twitch needs to change this so that all affiliates every time they stream get transcoding
hello and welcome i'm machine dana i hope you're having a really really good day welcome to the
video in this video i'm going to be talking all about transcoding it's process what it is
how it applies to you as a streamer youtube versus twitch i'm going to be talking a lot
about the differences between a partner on twitch to an affiliate to a non-affiliate or
partner going to be going into a little bit of detail about the actual screen sizes around the
world and i'll basically explain the implications of transcoding to you it's a very short video if
you find parts of this video really useful i'd appreciate if you hit the like button feel free
to subscribe to my channel do loads of streaming videos discord stream decks go xlrs hardware
software all kinds of stuff for streamers and content creators also you're more than
welcome to come check me out at twitch.tv forward slash machine dana let's go first of all what is
transcoding um it sounds really complicated it's pretty straightforward it's basically
the process of converting an audio or video file from one encoding format to another in order to
increase the number of compatible target devices media file can be played on it's not the same as
encoding encoding is normally encoding some specific file format while it's transcoding is
making encoded formats more available for other formats and therefore able to play it on multiple
different screens and resolutions and things like that they're not the same thing but it's
really really important and obviously twitch uses transcoding any media platform like youtube and
so on we'll use transcoding too i'm just going to talk briefly about what the common screen
resolutions are because this is quite important so by far the most common resolutions are displayed
here obviously 1920 1080 is a really really common one you're pretty safe if you're streaming at 1920
by 1080. the problem is if there's no transcoding and we'll get into a bit more detail about this in
a second that can potentially limit your content to only a number of people in certain regions but
as you can see here the common resolutions are what they are but with obs studio and
streamlabs obs you can set the dimensions of your canvas resolution and then normally you
can resize that to a output resolution as well so essentially saying you can define what your
input resolution is and your output resolution in the software that you're using to broadcast on so
you've got quite a lot of flexibility over this i wanted to show these stats here because they're
really really important to something i'm going to talk about a bit later in the video this is the
global stack counter of screen resolutions but i think it takes into account a wider array of
screen resolutions so screen resolution starts worldwide common resolutions here i think we're
actually in the usa but these are worldwide now obviously twitch and youtube are worldwide
streaming platforms and not just targeting the major regions like america like certain parts
of europe and things like that there's a massive viewership in south america for example and in
the far east as well most streamers have had a situation where a certain person will say it's
not working very well for me or it's buffering or something like that and that's normally an
issue with their internet and the amount of data that they're trying to get from your
content into their sort of bottlenecked internet and of course if you're outputting in 1920 1080
and they can only handle let's say a 540 or a 360. that's going to cause bottlenecks it's
going to cause buffering it's going to degrade the experience for them unless of course they
can choose to reduce the quality by transcoding and we'll show this in a second but i did really
really want to show these stats because if you actually look at this 360 by 640 four by eight
nine six and this one here is quite a small one so you've got like four percent here four and
let's say six and a half here got the best part of whatever 15 15 to 20 of screen sizes really
quite small screen sizes and this is like a global counter here i'll drop this link below because you
may want to play around with this you can filter by region and things like that for instance if
you're specifically trying to target a particular market and you may want to consider a different
screen resolutions based on the target market screen sizes on average one of the reasons why i
wanted to show this i was really surprised at just how many people are watching on small screen sizes
so why is transcoding important well transcoding is not really a benefit to the streamer if you
can output at one resolution or another resolution it broadly doesn't matter to
your content you're going to be doing the same things regardless of your resolution really
transcoding to you as the streamer is not as relevant as it is to your viewers and now the
thing is it's the amount of viewers that open up to you if you have transcoding options if you
don't know what transcoding is i'm just going to jump into youtube here's one of my videos recently
this has been transcoded by youtube and every video will get transcoded down by youtube and
the highest transcoding value that it will be will always be what you've submitted it as it
can't create more pixels all they can do is cut your pixels down if that makes sense so youtube
what they do they will start at the top so i've submitted this at 1080 they will always do a 720
480 360 240 and a 144 if you've submitted it at 1080. if you submit it at 720 then it'll
do all of those if you submit it at 480 it'll do all these below it similarly if i submit it
in 4k it would then drop it with a 1080 and then all these as well youtube does that as a matter of
course twitch does not and we'll get into some of the details about this so here's an example
of transcoding on twitch uh here's my buddy lucky gg he's currently doing a 24 hour stream he's 21
hours into it he's got three hours left shout out to you lucky i hope you do really well on your 24
hour stream for whatever reason as an affiliate lookie has been able to get transcoding for this
stream and maybe this is because he is doing a 24-hour stream and it's been given to him part of
the way through the stream or maybe he had it from the start because of low demand but the point is
he does have transcoding let's just have a quick look at what that looks like for an affiliate so
we now click on this cog icon in the bottom right here in the settings on desktop we can see that
lucky he streams in 720 at 60fps that's the source quality we can select the source quality so twitch
has transcoded this down to 480p 360p and 160p and the purpose of this is obviously so that
this content can be accessible to more different regions and people with lower quality internet so
let's just take a quick look at what that actually looks like in terms of the experience on stream
by the way i've asked him for a permission here to use this clip so looking thanks for letting me use
your stream as an example here so let's just drop it to 480 we'll see what the quality drop is here
it's kind of barely noticeable but you do notice that drop from 720 to 480 probably
the most noticeable drop in my opinion is from 480 to 360. see now we're getting a little bit of
tearing on the gameplay the menus here on minecraft are not as clear but some people
with really bad internet in certain parts of the world may only be able to watch in 160 and
as long as they're getting a consistent stream in here they may still believe it or not enjoy
the content this is particularly useful if it's on a smaller screen as well because the blurring will
be less obvious obviously i'm watching this on a 4k monitor so just to illustrate this i'm just
reducing the size of the screen you'll see that the the drop in quality is less noticeable the
fewer pixels that you're actually working with the key takeaway here is that even though lucky isn't
streaming at 1080 he's streaming at 720 he's still being given transcoding and we don't exactly know
the reasons why for that other than what we can predict might be the reasons the algorithm so it's
pretty clear that transcoding is really important just for being able to push your content to more
broader sets of people and obviously then you may get a benefit from it but the benefit really
is in the person being able to just access your content so who actually gets transcoding on twitch
well we've already established that if you're on youtube you will get transcoding no matter
what and that's whether you're live or whether you're submitting video content that's recorded
on youtube on twitch if you're not an affiliate or partner you will not get transcoding currently
hopefully that will change in the future but let's be honest if somebody is a fair weather
streamer that is treating it purely as a very small time hobby and they're not really trying
to grow their channel they can't even get past 50 followers as an example transcoding is really not
going to matter to those types of people and i know that sounds harsh when you've only got a
couple of people watching it really is not going to matter to those people that being said there
are more than a million affiliates and not every affiliate is guaranteed to get transcoding the
reason why this is a problem is because it's not really obvious what it's based on as to why you
would not get transcoding there's an algorithm i think some of it is demand based because all
partners will get transcoding as a guarantee you could argue that transcoding is a benefit of being
a partner but the thing is the benefit isn't to the streamer it's just to how many people that
streamer can actually access and in real terms it'll be you as the streamer your entertainment
value how much value and entertainment you add that's really going to make the difference between
you growing and not growing it won't be the trance code it might add a small amount two percent
five percent perhaps it's not gonna make a big difference that's still not the point though here
the thing is competition for twitch is youtube and they're doing what they're doing and there's
a very clear disparity here twitch needs to change this so that all affiliates every time they stream
get transcoding okay it might be an expensive thing to do maybe they just need to raise the bar
to who actually gets affiliate status there's a few different ways they could do this so if you're
an affiliate how do you actually get transcoding well we don't know exactly how the algorithm
works or the allocation of transcoding after it flows down from the partners one thing's for sure
if you're a more consistent streamer if you're getting a higher viewership as in perhaps not the
75 average concurrent viewers but if you're in the sort of 15 to 50 or 15 to 75 bracket you're more
likely to get it because at that point you've got more people watching you and therefore there is a
higher need for it versus somebody that's getting let's say a five average concurrent viewership
being a consistent streamer being a streamer that streams frequently and for a long period of time
are probably things that are going to help you get the transcoding there's more than likely a points
system that's attached to your profile in the background that you won't know about which is
algorithmic and it gives you a score based on all the different factors to do with popularity
and things like that and the higher up that score that you are the more likely it will be that you
get transcoding so in conclusion transcoding is really really important because it does
open up your content to much more than might otherwise be able to gain access to if somebody
has an internet that only allows a decent quality stream at 360p and you are streaming and are not
getting transcoded from 1080p you simply will not gain that viewer that's what it comes down
to you cannot have that viewer as he can't have a consistent viewing experience because
he won't be able to ingest all of your pixel through his bottlenecked internet the twitch
do need to change this i hope they change it soon it's not a luxury anymore transcoding's essential
did find this useful once again hit the like feel free to subscribe guys and have a great day
is