So I was greeted with an interesting pop-up when I updated my Battle.net launcher today. Turns out Blizzard is pushing Blizzard Streaming to “the Americas, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand”. Currently, Facebook is the only platform that you can stream to, and Blizzard hasn't announced bringing it to others, but the settings area is clearly a vertical list of horizontal widgets, so that suggests they intend to add more than one at some point.
As for the application, itself, this could be useful (especially if other services are added) for users who only stream Blizzard titles, and who want something designed a bit more mainstream than OBS. That said, Raptr and GeForce Experience both fall under this category. Moreover, Blizzard doesn't clarify whether or not the stream will make use of NVIDIA's NVENC, Intel's Quick Sync, or AMD's VCE, all three of which are supported on OBS Studio. Granted, Blizzard titles tend to be easy to compute, but it is hard to beat encoding on an idle, integrated GPU, if you should have one.
That said, choices are good, and you now have another.
No Facebook stuff for me – I
No Facebook stuff for me – I immediately went into the Battle.net settings and unchecked the streaming.
If I’m going to stream it’s going to be to Twitch. Using Shadowplay or OBS.
Some people are having serious crashes after the update that installed this “feature”. Not only does my second computer crash trying to launch WoW, it crashes trying to launch Borderlands games. Sometimes it locks up the computer entirely.
I’ve re-installed the Nvidia drivers and tried rolling back to the previous version as well as a couple of other things. No improvement.
It may not be for everyone,
It may not be for everyone, but for people with a lot of Facebook friends, that’s a built-in audience of potential viewership. The big accounts – that’s where the real benefit comes in.
Another useless streaming
Another useless streaming service. If anyone had a shot it would have been You Tube gaming, but that thing is terrible.
I’ve avoided Facebook for almost 2 years now, just have a dummy account for looking at links people send me.
No. Not facebook.
No. Not facebook.
I guess its good to see
I guess its good to see Blizzard putting some amount of effort into streaming. It shows that they are at least aware of it and are doing something to cater towards it.
But Facebook? Really?
I guess its better to do something different than try to implement half the features that OBS or Xsplit already has. People streaming on Twitch using real streaming software are just going to continue using that. Blizzard just can’t compete with all of those features.
The big wonder is whether somebody could continue doing their Twitch stream and just add Facebook if it doesn’t take many more resources, but upload speed would be a major factor in that.
Facebook is probably paying
Facebook is probably paying them.
Scott please ease up on the
Scott please ease up on the “That said” throw away line. It adds precious little to anything and you use it way too often.