As high frame rate monitors become the norm in the gaming space, it seems reasonable to assume that viewers would be excited to watch their favorite creators at smoother frame rates that reflect the intensity of actual footage. In addition, the release of more powerful, yet affordable, hardware has made this accessible to more creators as well. Higher resolution is already a standard to video streaming in pre-recorded formats (capped at lower frame rates), while the norm for most of gamers remains 1080p. This is a debatable topic but the priority in many popular titles is that smoother, high FPS experience in lieu of high resolution. Having that option to both game and consume live content at higher than 60 FPS would be a huge feather in the cap to not only the platform, but the individual creators bold enough to push the envelope in their content.

The biggest limitation it seems would be bandwidth, but again, this is becoming less of an issue as high speed internet spreads across the world, and twitch already has baked in means to correct this with its quality settings.

OBS Studio already supports the capture of high frame rate and/or high resolution content as do many of the hardware manufacturers producing capture devices. The tools are there. We just have to pick them up and make it happen.

You could consider separating the video quality settings from audio quality settings, since audio quality is far more important than video for some content.
There are Music and Performance streams and such where we're interested in listening to the sound more that looking at text / faces / fine details.

• New show hosts frequently receive advice to invest in buying better audio equipment to improve audio quality before looking to buy more expensive cameras. This is because people will tolerate bad video in a show much more than bad audio (although 160p is still kinda bad).




• I've listened to several streams where notes seem out of pitch and the stream chat/host think it's probably compression. It seems to be worse at 360p or 480p quality than at higher.

You might just want to do another round of quality testing on the audio compression.

(I'm not actually sure whether audio is actually compressed any further/differently at different quality levels but it seems to be.) The problem might be when broadcasting audio that has already been compressed, like by apple music or youtube?

Some streams you could mute and watch at high quality, other streams you could play in a secondary browser tab and presumably not require data for video that you're not watching, and I think the chat window might pop-out somewhere if you just wanted to follow that without watching the show, but there might be a problem with trying to listen to high-fidelity/quality audio without stuttering.