[covercash]

Twitch just announced a partnership with Nvidia at CES to allow streamers to encode multiple versions of their stream on their own PC and push them to Twitch. Previously, only partner/affiliate streams had transcoded streams at various levels of quality. That might cut back on the amount of transcoding Twitch has to do server side…

They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon which can help reduce bandwidth costs. They currently only support h264.

[belthesar]

This is interesting, as I had an idea to do this when I was working on a competitor service during lockdown. Our idea was to use this to cut the cost on transcoded renditions, and for streamers that didn't have the ability to generate multiple renditions but still wanted them, we would offer it as a service in exchange for a higher cut of their revenue. That said, if anyone gets a benefit from lower quality renditions being distributed, it's Twitch.

If you think about it, the less bandwidth that Twitch consumes through their CDN network, the less money a stream costs per minute. A viewer still watches ads with the same CPM, a viewer still subscribes for the same amount per month per broadcaster, a viewer optionally pays the same for ad-free viewing (Turbo), and a viewer pays the same premium for bits, regardless of what quality they're watching at. So, interestingly enough, the economics of limiting transcoding are more about limited capacity and ensuring a positive cost per streamer. If a streamer does not become an affiliate or partnered broadcaster on the platform, the only revenue Twitch gets from the streamer is the ad money from its viewers. By virtue, they want as many casters on the platform as possible to become affiliates, as being able to get commissions from bit sales and subscriptions gives Twitch more revenue streams for the same content.

So, to your point, they definitely want to be able to support more efficient codecs that are not as patent encumbered as h.265 (which IIRC did have limited support in SE Asian markets), because at the end of the day, if streamers are generating the renditions for the ABR ladder, and ultimately, folks are using lower bitrates, then overall, this cuts costs for the same operational cost.

[Tmpod]

> They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon

You mean HEVC (x265)? I believe NVENC is just nvidia's hardware accelerated implementations of existing codecs.

Anyways, that sounds really interesting for both streamers who want more control over their streams' encoding, but obviously for Twitch, as it saves them compute power (though upping their intake bandwith?).

I wonder how feasible it would be for most streamers. Pushing one stream vs 3 or so is quite the difference.

[bombcar]

I've always been entirely annoyed that there's no way for me to "encode what Google wants" for YouTube so it can be available directly, at least at highest bitrate.