How do you feel about Beam?

Low latency is handy but it does seem to degrade in performance after a while. Possibly still having memory leak problems or something. If I hard refresh it every so often it's OK.

Very mixed. It was just fine then I couldn't see the video at all. Idk what's going on.

The ios player has an "audio only" option, which I love. Then again, so does the Twitch app.

I've caught a few of Jeff's Beam streams and they always run great for me. No real issues with the service and the low latency is a nice bonus.

Works perfectly fine for me unlike the twitch player.

It felt a little bit unreliable. It would work just fine and suddenly stop and talk about buffering issues. Refreshing fixed it but it was never truly trouble free. Never had those issues with either their own stuff or twitch/youtube. On the other hand, picture quality seemed pretty good and the lack of latency is useful. And since it had all those hiccup issues, the lack of a way to scrub through what you might have missed is also a little bit of an issue.

Anything but Twitch.

Youtube works best for me, so that.

s'allrite

Never got the stream to start, so sucks.

Also when I try to watch an archived stream on beam, it has an obnoxious "waveform" thing at the bottom of the screen that just doesn't go away and it's super annoying.

Works way better than Twitch for me thats for sure.

i thought it looked good

This is pretty much exactly what happens to me too. I've noticed the issues are worse if I use my chromecast, but it happens whether I do or don't.

It was fine, but so are Youtube and Twitch. I'm using Chromium instead of Chrome, so no flash plugin. Anything that uses html5 (or whatever other open standard) instead of flash is OK in my book. Other than that they're all mostly the same to me

all things serve the Beam

I couldn't place my finger on what Jeff was doing that made the stream felt different until he pointed out that the super low frequency can allow him to react to chat pretty much live or close to it. So I actually think that's pretty cool!

I'm on board for anything but embedded Twitch streams. Youtube and Beam have both been much more stable. But why give Google even more money? So I voted for Beam.

It cut out a few times on me for several seconds each time. Otherwise it worked perfectly fine. Would need another trial to see if it's a regular thing. Still like it better than Twitch. That always took forever to load. And the latency is bad on Youtube. Beam might be an acceptable compromise if it only cuts out on rare occasions.

Almost real time chat is nice and I've had no problems otherwise. I think it is fine for me. YMMV

Youtube live has a problem in firefox where it acts as a vod and not a live player. Twitch player literally crashes my PC. Havent been in much beam streams but it works, i guess.

It's great. Glad he's using it and not Twitch. Zero issues. But doesn't really matter to me what he uses as long as I get to see all these really cool old games.

I've never had any problem with beam and the low latency is awesome.
I have had several problems with both Youtube and Twitch however.

Beam is great.. it only lacks the audience.. once it gets added into Windows 10 and Xbox that might change.

@ayuoichi: Like Jeff has said, are they only able to achieve such low latency because barely anyone is on it? I can't remember my Beam login but finding Jeff's stream on Beam is incredibly easy because even with just a few people watching he's at the top. If more people start using the service, will they still be able to deliver what sets Beam apart from the others.

Memory Leak was such a great segment. My favourite even.

Also, holy shit GameSpot revived Button Mashing as "Super Button Mashing"? How did I not know of this? How did I not know that Brad Muir and Ricardo Torres competed in the same episode?

Oh and yes, Beam seems really effective at what it does.

@mrcraggle: They use custom protocol/software for the super lower latency streaming called FTL. Normal streaming use the same protocol twitch and other streaming services uses called RTMP.

Beam is owned by Microsoft now so if they get popular they should not have problems getting more servers

@ayuoichi: their normal option still provides better ltency than others. It's still like only a 3 second delay.. if that. I love beam but their iOS app is terrible. No user control over your own channel while logged in. No option/button even to view your own profile.

@isomeri: God damn it.

@mrcraggle: I definitely think that's one of the possibilities, Twitch used to be much better with both latency and archiving too but its massive popularity forced it to reduce those features.

I really prefer it over Twitch despite the sync issues (probably worse for overseas viewers). The latency makes it SOOOO much easier to chat with streamers in real time rather than waiting for the delay and the integrated game features will be interesting to see when they become more common.

It's rough around the edges, but so was Justin.tv back in the day...and look how that turned out. I hope Microsoft can bring it up to par with Twitch and Youtube.

I have yet to use it, but Twitch has always felt easy to use and well-designed to me. More competition in this space is welcome of course.

I really like it, though the last 2 Jeff streams were my first time knowing about it. I think the interface/stability is way nicer then Youtube or Twitch currently, and the low latency is super neat. I hope they keep using it.

@pezen: +1 to this. When it works it's great, but I also had a bunch of buffering issues that I don't have with Twitch or Youtube.

Beam is far and away the best streaming service I've ever seen. Bummed that it isn't working properly for some people.

It runs fine for me I don't really see much of a difference.

The first time I saw a Beam stream was probably pretty shortly after it launched, last year. I was utterly blown away by the picture quality, and the way the streamers instantly responded to stuff in chat was pretty magical. Later in the year, I watched another stream by the same group and it was unwatchable. It would "buffer" (read: freeze) CONSTANTLY, and most of chat complained of the same issues. The streamers had no idea what was different.

If the problem is on Beam's side, and they actually worked that stuff out, then I'm 100% into what they're doing. For what it's worth, the Giant Bomb streams I've watched that used Beam have been OK to great... never in that "Unwatchable" territory. So yeah, I'm totally cool with still trying it out!

I think it's great, but it lacks a feature I use a lot: I can't scroll backwards. If I come late to a stream I sometimes scroll to the beginning and watch from there instead of waiting for the archive, so that makes it more inconvenient than Youtube.

@ripelivejam: Thank you. Made my day.

For what I've seen so far of it, it's amazing. It's relatively amazing, though. I think if we sit and compare it to YouTube or Twitch it's easy to get on it's side. Once it has a heavier load and continues to be great will be the real determining factor. Until then, though, I will enjoy the higher-quality, low-latency streams it offers!

Sorry to bump but it seems that Microsoft updated Beam to 2.0. What does that mean to you?

Well, here's a list of changes:

• Revamped home page
• Higher bitrates (up to 10Mbps) and higher resolutions (1440p at 60 frames per second)
• Xbox live login
• Faster site loading

It appears that there have been some under the hood changes too. I'll be interested to see if these changes will help out with the problems that people here were having. Jeff should do another stream sometime soon and see if there's any difference.

For more details on the update, check out Engadgets article

The biggest problem i had with Beam was having lag between the typed text and the text actually appearing in the chatbox. It also took quite a while for the player to load and on my tablet it was pretty much not possible to see a stream without hitches. I also don't care much for all the purplish/ blue stuff taking up screen estate (on Twitch i like to have the stream and the chat on screen, and nothing else.)

But the low latency is very cool. Reminds me of the time when Twitch was still a small platform. Sadly, it costs a lot to keep that latency as low as it is, especially as more and more people start using the service. That makes me kinda weary to get too invested in Beam, because apart from that boon, i don't see what it does better than it's competitors.

It lags sometimes for me, and sometimes It just sits there and buffers for ever. I like the idea of it, just wish it worked better for me.

@naoiko: New update I mentioned fixed that for you at all?

I would like more exposure first but I can definitely say it seems like a decent alternative to Twitch. YouTube is better than Twitch too, I think.

I really like it, better than Twitch for sure.