Valve accidentally shows off its Steam.tv live streaming service

[midian182]

Something to look forward to: Not content with being the world’s largest digital distribution platform for gaming, it seems that Steam wants to be a top player in other markets, too, including game streaming. Valve accidentally showed its Twitch-rivalling hand a few days ago, when Steam.tv briefly went live before being pulled

Steam already has streaming capabilities with its Steam Community hubs, but it’s far from an extensive experience and doesn’t come close to matching Twitch.

For the short time it was available, Steam.tv showed a livestream of DOTA 2 from Valve’s The International Tournament 2018. The stream, which wasn’t available on the Steam desktop app, let viewers access their Steam friends list. Users could invite friends and create groups to watch the video together while discussing the action. There was also built-in voice chat support for Google Chrome.

Valve later confirmed to CNET that its broadcast was unintentional. "We are working on updating Steam Broadcasting for the Main Event of The International, Dota 2's annual tournament," a representative said. "What people saw was a test feed that was inadvertently made public."

With Twitch constantly averaging over 1 million concurrent viewers—this year has seen it reach a maximum of almost 3 million viewers at once—Steam.tv has an uphill struggle if it wants to compete with the industry leader. To a lesser extent, YouTube Gaming and Microsoft’s Mixer offer alternative game streaming capabilities.

Live Broadcasting is the latest Steam element that the company is upgrading. Last month, its new chat system, which boasts many of Discord’s features, was rolled out to everyone after completing a beta phase.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/76035-valve-accidentally-shows-off-steamtv-live-streaming-service.html

 

[kapital98]

There is plenty of room for competition. The market is growing. Plus, Twitch has always been a weird fit for a company like Amazon. It remains to be seen how much they will put into Twitch if better competition comes out.

 

[WethamanClanVid]

Especially now that Twitch has just announced that it will be removing its ad free perk from its Twitch Prime subscription I feel Steam.TV may have a shot to take some of the streamers away from Twitch. Not to mention millions already use Steam so adding a streaming service just seems to go hand in hand with what they are already doing as a service.