{"id":101124,"date":"2016-08-12T17:41:06","date_gmt":"2016-08-12T15:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=101124"},"modified":"2016-08-15T07:44:25","modified_gmt":"2016-08-15T05:44:25","slug":"why-microsofts-new-beam-streaming-service-is-better-than-twitch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/101124-why-microsofts-new-beam-streaming-service-is-better-than-twitch","title":{"rendered":"Why Microsoft’s new Beam streaming service is better than Twitch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft has announced its acquisition of streaming service Beam, reports ArsTechnica<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Unlike its closest competitor Twitch, Beam focuses on a number of “gamified” features, encouraging and rewarding active participation in the community.<\/p>\n

“The more you watch and interact with Beam, the more Beam XP you earn, which can be spent on in-game votes, cosmetic boosts, and other perks within the Beam interface.”<\/p>\n

It’s also very clever about how it promotes its community, offering some of these boosts only when it doesn’t recognize the use\u00a0of\u00a0ad-blocking services.<\/p>\n

As the service has been built from the ground up as a game streaming platform, it will also feature native, tappable buttons as well as a downloadable SDK available to game developers for integration with their games,<\/p>\n

“Should those features not interest people who are hooked on either YouTube Gaming or Twitch, Beam’s other major differentiation might do the trick –\u00a0ultra-low latency<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Beam advertises an average difference of 200 milliseconds between when a game event happens and when viewers see it, which will certainly make chat during frenetic games that much smoother between players and fans.”<\/p>\n

Check out how Microsoft plans to integrate these cool new features in the video below:<\/p>\n