YouTube has officially launched its gaming hub, where gamers can post game plays and commentary. It is also a platform for live-streaming.
Google's giant video website launched Wednesday the new YouTube Gaming hub, which is dedicated for gaming videos. YouTube dominates the world of recorded video. Now, it is stepping into the live streaming domain. Video games as spectator sports became a success with underdog Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon last year for $970 million.
YouTube Gaming is definitely an app that will overtake that success. People can only expect Google to make live streaming even bigger and for broader audiences. Twitch has tech-savvy people broadcasting in their site, but YouTube popularizes live-streaming to the mainstream.
YouTube has higher bitrates, transcoding, and it can rewind instantly, unlike its rival Twitch. YouTube Gaming doesn't only have live-streaming, which is the only thing that Twitch offers. YouTube gaming has other videos dedicated to gaming like cosplay, live-action, etc.
YouTube Gaming offers a lot of content, and users can easily search and navigate through them. YouTube streams more games than Twitch.
YouTube Gaming, however, is not perfect, as there are certain downsides to it. There are aspects in the new site that are not as smooth as the viewing experience in video streams. Some users complain about frozen scroll bars in the comment fields, slow performance, and hard locks that require you to refresh the live streaming page.
The intensity of the game can also affect the quality of the video being streamed. The wonderful Witcher III will not be fun to watch in this site.
Overall, analysts consider YouTube as one of Google's best features. In 2013, Google reports that people watched YouTube for a total of 6 billion hours. The most important feature that YouTube Gaming has to offer is the convenience of searching for video game content.
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