One thing that has been a pretty major pain in the ass is trying to live stream mobile games on services like TwitchTV. Generally you have to come up with your own solutions to get this to work and half the time it is generally too slow to run through an emulator or anything like that. Lag is another issue half the time. The advent of Android-powered micro-consoles has helped this a bit though.
Yet even with the popularity of streaming gameplay live onto services like TwitchTV, or just watching streams on your mobile device, there just isn’t a lot one can do to stream a mobile game and there is even less in the way of tools for developers to natively include this sort of feature in their games. There are a few services available for gameplay recording and sharing, but that isn’t streaming live and interacting with viewers.
TwitchTV has finally announced that mobile games will soon be able to stream to the company’s service for others to watch. Developers will have a complete set of tools as well, thanks to an SDK Twitch will be putting out which will allow developers to integrate a live streaming feature right into their games.
TwitchTV SDK Features:
– The ability to capture and broadcast gameplay video and audio
– Video capture from the front-facing camera
– Audio capture using an internal or external microphone
– Videos can be archived for immediate viewing on Twitch and uploaded for sharing
– Broadcast quality can be toggled between High, Medium, and Low settings
– Robust chat options including emoticons badges and chat colors
– The easy discovery of related broadcasts from other game
Basically developers and broadcasters will have almost all the features PC and console game streamers will have once this goes live. This is something we have been looking forward to happening for some time, having had to rig up our own solutions up until now.
As for when we can expect to have all this roll out and developer’s integrating streaming into their games? The SDK’s release is slated to happen at around the same time the TwitchTV app hits 10 million downloads (total). So pretty soon actually.
Official Website: TwitchTV
