After the sad news of Microsoft’s streaming platform Mixer going the way of the dodo it was time to take a look at an alternative during those random times when I want to share my online misadventures. On Xbox right now that means Twitch and thankfully it still appears to be up to the task. It had been a VERY long time since I had last tried broadcasting from Twitch so I was afraid too much had changed (especially with Mixer being integrated) but I have to give the app credit in that it keeps things a s simple as possible and it still integrates nicely. It works as well as you can expect and I’m impressed.

One thing I’m really happy about when using the Twitch app is that EVERYTHING you need to set up a broadcast is accessible from a single page – there’s a lot of options in the app to tweak the experience but it’s easy to understand. I like that the options for video quality are right there and easy to change. Mixer’s integration with Xbox hid these under settings so it wasn’t as obvious where to find them. Some nights when network speeds aren’t great it’s nice to know I can bump it down to 720p with a quick adjustment. When you start broadcasting the same overlay Mixer uses is leveraged and can still be moved around the screen but unfortunately the chat window from not available which depending on your perspective may be a good thing. If you have the Twitch app on your mobile or tablet, you can use that instead to track conversations that come up during a stream and it works well too. It does feel like there are a few more moving parts to deal with if you’re moving away from Mixer but it all works and there is nothing to stop anyone from making the “switch to Twitch”. It’ll be interesting to see if Facebook Gaming can succeed with an implementation this seamless.

I’m really glad that I spent a little more time on this to learn a transition from Mixer to Twitch is not going to be a problem and I’m hoping it’ll give me incentive to continue using it for future games. Can’t say I’ll ever stream anything useful but I’m here and will likely pop up from time to time in the future. 🙂