It would be great if you guys could set an African, or South African, server up at some point in the not-too-distant future. I live in South Africa and have a really hard time streaming to any of the EU, let alone the NA or Asian ones. Currently YouTube has streaming servers here but it just isn't the same streaming to YouTube Gaming. The Twitch community is what makes it what it is and not being able to run a stable stream from here in South Africa turns so many would-be streamers away from potential bright futures on Twitch.tv. We have a large community of gamers ready and waiting.

Please consider setting a server up for us down here or wherever else you can that's not too far. South Africa and the other countries nearby deserve a chance too! :D

First of all, forgive my mistakes in English is not my native language. I made this in two languages to make more people able to vote for this.

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Primero de todo, disculpar mis errores en inglés, no es mi lenguaje nativo. He hecho esto en dos idiomas para poder conseguir que más gente que vote esta iniciativa. La petición en español se encuentra debajo de la explicación en inglés.

EXPLANATION IN ENGLISH.

Dear staff of Twitch.tv,

it’s been a little time for me doing live broadcasts and I would like to address an issue that I been thinking closely and so how it can be solved.

I haven’t been streaming for a long time on Twitch.tv, that’s a reality. But somehow I keep having the same issue that keeps existing and it is latently in the Spanish and Latin America community especially.

The issue lies that a lot of people living in Spain still doesn’t have good connections that are able to maintain live broadcasts with source quality.
Only in cityes you may be able to get stable connections upper than 3Mb, and I would like to undermark the word stable, since you need that in order to follow a live broadcast.
This case is even worse at Latin America, which having an stable connection of 3Mb may be considered in some cases a luxury or simply something not accesible for everyone.

Being this the reality, I see everyday how a lot of people enter my channel and leaves because the broadcast keeps loading or suffer cuts that makes the visualization impossible. Some people express himself and ends up leaving, others simply don’t bother.

They simple see that are only capable to follow content on partnered channels where there is a lot of people, but that content may not be of his interest, and after all leave the platform.

Everyday I see how Twitch.tv and I keep losing potential viewers that would like to enjoy the platform but they cannot.
And this issue it may be happening in a lot of channels, but here I can only explain my experience.
Since I talk from my own experience I refer to the Spanish and Latin American community which is my target, but maybe other new streamers from other countryes are having the same issue.

I really like to stream everything I play, from here I give you my sincere congratulations for achieving make this platform so big. But I got something else to ask you and that is to not forget about those who are today big we’re also small.

This is the problem, which maybe you have proof about it and I have tried to express. But also I would like to share a the solution I have been thinking about, and if you consider it somewhow end up applying it.

I have seen that there’s a subscription mode called Turbo for those people that are interested in the advantages that you actually offer.

Why not put to that service an option for new broadcasters that could allow the capacity of doing it in different quality?

I would be happy to be pay if my issue that also benefits Twitch.tv would been fixed. All those people I’m talking about won’t be leaving again, they would stay, enjoying what they’re expecting to see.

One of the examples I have thinking about it’s about creating an additional subscription called Streamer Turbo or Turbo2. Which

Streamer Turbo would be an independent service from Turbo, and Turbo2 would be an upgrade.
Streamer Turbo would give the chance to stream in various quality.
Or the case of Turbo2, the streamers will be paying for the actual subscription of Turbo an a bonus to access to stream in various quality.

Dear Twitch.tv staff, there are a lot of channels that doesn’t have the minium followers to ask for partnership like mine which has a short life, but I think that you’re big enough to bring a solution to this issue.

This may sound like a personal letter, but is nothing like an adapted mail I sent some time ago to the support center.
After all they could do was to give me some advice and refer me to this page to make this petition, which I also appreciate since I didn’t know that this section existed.

Please, have in mind that this is not for me, is for all Twitch.tv new and old streamers, that nowadays are still uncapable to have this issue solved.

I would like to once again thank you for your time and I send you a cordial greeting expecting to hear from you soon.

Thanks a lot.

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Traducción a Español.

Querido personal de Twitch.tv,

tras algún tiempo haciendo retransmisiones en vivo me pongo en contacto con vosotros para tratar un asunto que llevo algunos días pensándolo detenidamente y así mismo cómo podría solucionarse.

No llevo mucho tiempo en Twitch.tv retransmitiendo, es una realidad. Sin embargo me encuentro con un problema que sí existe y es latente en la comunidad Española y de Latinoamérica.

El problema radica en que muchas de las personas residentes en España, por raro que parezca aún siguen sin tener buenas conexiones que sean capaces de mantener retransmisiones en vivo con calidad original.
Solo en ciudades se pueden conseguir líneas estables superiores a 3Mb, y quiero remarcar la palabra estable, ya que para seguir retransmisiones existe esa necesidad.
El caso que argumento se agrava mucho más en Latinoamérica, donde tener una línea de Internet suficientemente estable o superior a 3Mb podría considerarse un pequeño lujo o simplemente algo no accesible para todos.

Siendo esta la realidad, todos los días veo como mucha gente entra y se va porque la retransmisión se le corta, se le queda cargando y en definitiva no puede visualizarla correctamente. Algunos lo dicen, otros directamente no se molestan.

En definitiva ven que solo son capaces de ver canales en los que hay muchísima gente y posiblemente ése contenido no les interese y acaben abandonando la plataforma.

Todos los días veo como Twitch.tv y yo estoy perdiendo posibles seguidores que les gustaría disfrutar de la plataforma pero no pueden. Posiblemente esté pasando en muchos otros canales, pero sólo puedo exponer mis vivencias.

A mí me encanta poder retransmitir aquello que estoy jugando y desde aquí os doy mi más sincera enhorabuena por haber conseguido algo tan grande. Pero tengo algo más que pediros y es que no os olvidéis de que aquellos que a día de hoy son grandes también fueron pequeños.

Os he hecho saber un problema existente, el cuál seguramente tengáis conocimiento de ello y hasta aquí os lo he expresado. A su vez también me gustaría compartir con vosotros una pequeña solución a ello, y si la consideraseis oportuna, os pediría aplicarla.

He visto que ponéis a disposición de aquellas personas que lo deseen suscribirse a un servicio llamado Turbo.

¿Porqué a ese servicio o a otro servicio encarado a personas que retransmiten sin ser socios no añadirle la capacidad de que aquella gente que desee retransmitir en vivo pueda hacerlo en distintas calidades?

Yo estaría encantado de poder pagar para que mi problema que a su vez también beneficia a Twitch.tv estuviera solucionado. Todas esas personas de las que hablo no se volverían a ir, se quedarían en la plataforma, disfrutarían de aquello que han venido a ver.

Uno de los ejemplos que se me había ocurrido es crear una subscripción llamada Streamer Turbo o Turbo 2, el cuál sería como un servicio superior o totalmente independiente del Turbo actual.

Streamer Turbo daría la capacidad de activar la opción de calidad en el canal y ya está.
O en el caso de Turbo2, los streamers estaríamos pagando por el servicio de Turbo actual y un extra para acceder a la prestación de calidad para los espectadores en el canal.

Querido personal de Twitch.tv, sé que mi canal no llega a los mínimos para pediros ser vuestro socio, como ya he expresado tiene poca vida, pero creo que sois tan grandes como para poder ofrecer una solución a ello.

Sé que esto puede parecer una carta, pero no deja de ser un correo adaptado que envié al grupo de soporte hace algún tiempo.
Después de todo ellos solamente me pudieron dar el consejo de publicar aquí mi petición, para que se tuviera en cuenta, lo cual también agradezco ya que no sabía de la existencia de esta sección.

Por favor, tener en cuenta que esto no es para mí, es para todos aquellos nuevos y antiguos streamers, que a día de hoy aún siguen teniendo este problema sin resolver.

Una vez más os doy las gracias por vuestro tiempo y me despido con un cordial saludo esperando tener noticias vuestras.

Muchas gracias,

Dear Sirs,

I am from Karachi, Pakistan and I am unable to stream properly on twitch as i get high latency on it so please launch Middle east /Pakistani servers for twitch. Due to the unavailability of these servers. I am either directed to Mumbai, Singapore or EU servers on which i get 140ms plus ping if there will be middle east servers. I will be getting around 10 to 40ms ping which would be perfectly fine for low latency streams.

As Pakistan is the 6th most populated country in the world and the increase in gamers/streamers in Pakistan is rapid so it is necessary for you guys to take these feedback seriously if you dont take action against this now then Pakistanis will be forced to stream on other platforms like Mixer, YouTube etc and grow their community there.

Thanks

As the streaming industry embraces new technology, alongside increased internet speed standards, I would love for Twitch to adopt full transcoding for all active streamers as well as an increase in the bitrate cap to 10k.

The current issue with the 6k bitrate cap for non-partners is inherently-lowered viewer experience. Viewers are consistently looking for superior quality streams as the first impression of long-term engagement and retention, which the current 6k bitrate cap severely inhibits due to automatic pixelation for high-movement games such as FPS. Since partners have the automatic 8-8.5k bitrate cap increase, this gives partnered content creators an automatically increased opportunity on the platform due to increased video quality enhancement while non-partnered streamers making up over 90% of the platform are automatically handicapped to lower settings.

In addition, transcoding should be a set standard for all viewers to obtain regardless of partner status and allow for a flexible viewing experience based on viewer internet speeds instead of automatically forcing non-partnered streamers to lower their video quality settings or pray for random transcoding opportunity.

I've been uploading old vods for the purpose of vodcasting on a channel I'm editor for for the last week, and long muted sections have been a recurring problem. It takes hours to upload and process a vod, just to find out that long sections are muted and there's nothing I can do about them at vodcast time.

Some suggestions
1. When vods are vodcasted, play them unmuted (since they aren't archived anyway and are essentially canned live broadcasts)
2. Allow a way to quickly remove muted sections from a vod
3. Provide editors the ability to fast-forward through vods being vodcast
4. At least allow editors to see which songs are causing the mute

Bitrate is a funny little thing. When a stream pushes the limit of the bitrate selected in OBS/Xplit (due to high resolution/framerate/visual effects), artifacting occurs, and the stream will appear distorted (pixelated? mosaic-y?).

On Twitch, the current maximum upload bitrate is stated to be 6000 kbps, with a hard cut-off a bit above that number. From what I understand, this is to keep server costs at a reasonable level, and to maintain a smooth viewing experience on channels without transcoding.

That said, YouTube, a platform mainly focused on hosting pre-recorded and edited content, encourages streamers to stream to their website at higher resolutions and bitrates. For example, YouTube advises streamers to stream at up to 9000 kbps to comfortably stream at 1080p and 60fps, and even recommends for 4K 60fps streams to be done at up to 51,000 kbps.

Understandably, an instant switch to such a high bitrate for everyone would be a big sudden expense for Twitch, and one that probably cannot even be enjoyed by most viewers of non-partnered streams.

However, considering all of this, I don't think this is an unreasonable request:

Please roll out a bitrate limit increase to 10000 kbps, allowing for clean 1080p60 streams on the platform. If absolutely necessary, roll it out to partners first to test the waters, and then start rolling it out to affiliates.
Eventually in the future I would love to see a Twitch platform on which affiliates can comfortably stream at 1080p60fps, and partners up to 4K60fps if they wish to.

TL DR; make number go up, streams get better ;p

• Higher Bitrate: (Above 10.000, with video quality selector can be managed so if someone won't use that high download usage, he can tweak it), we still have a really low bitrate, and that force us try to tweak OBS to reach higher quality with lower CPU encoding speed. Still this is not a miracle, and 6000 bitrate is so limited (even if there is a trick to go beyond and reach 8000 bitrate).

• HDR: OBS doesn't support because it's not worth it nowadays since Twitch is not supporting it, but other platforms are starting to give a hint to this technology. I think would be nice to have this option since Twitch is being used in so many Smart TV's in the present. So they could enjoy Twitch in a higher quality. Probably this option should need Twitch partnering with OBS or any other streaming program to make it possible in the best way.

• Higher framerate/resolution: These days we're having better connections that allow us to go beyond the old limits, we could make this work since right now is really normal to see a gameplay in 120FPS and even the next gen consoles are supporting it.

Twitch is the best stream platform, but our technical options are the same since almost 10 years ago. We should aim to higher quality so there are no quality loss between our viewership and our content.

It's time to wake up and make some improvements :)

Improve servers over big streamings events.

This is just logical, but it is quite frustrating that the platform literally looks the other way. I'm talking here about Spain particularily. Whenever some of the biggest streamers make a special streaming, or an event, the rest of the platform falls. And I mean all of it. The rest of streamers won't even have enough bandwidth to stream themselves, which honestly is insulting given how much benefits the platform registers over time. Fortify your servers or die trying, because this happens now more than ever, the rate is increasing and you are disabling hundreds and thousands of streamers for the big fish in the plate that night.

I have a chrome extension installed that allows me to change the speed of any video I watch. Due to this, I can always see the speed of videos in the top left corner. I've noticed that any time a stream I'm watching lags or I fall too far behind live, Twitch will automatically change the speed of the stream from 1x to 1.03x speed. I believe this is a good idea and the change in speed is small enough to not affect the video. However, this speed change DOES affect the audio and in the case of music streams, it horribly detunes the audio. I don't think this speed change needs to be taken out but it needs to be implemented in a way that doesn't affect audio