Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting - Higher Bitrate

Twitch, OBS and NVIDIA are leveling up livestreaming technology with the new Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting beta, powered by GeForce RTX GPUs. Available in a few days, streamers will be able to stream multiple encodes concurrently, providing optimal viewing experiences for all viewers. Today, many streamers must choose between higher resolution and reliable streaming. High-quality video provides more enjoyable viewing experiences but causes streams to buffer for viewers with low bandwidth or older viewing devices. Streaming lower-bitrate video allows more people to watch the content seamlessly, but introduces artefacts.

In the coming months, Enhanced Broadcasting beta testers (opt-in to the beta at dashboard.twitch.tv/broadcast) will be able to experiment with higher-input bit rates, up to 4K resolutions, up to 5 concurrent streams, as well as new codecs in the future.

To simplify set up, Enhanced Broadcasting will automatically configure all OBS encoder settings, including resolution, bit rate and encoding parameters. As explained by EposVox, Enhanced Broadcasting relies on Enhanced RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) specifications. Transcoded video is sent to Twitch with all parameters such as encoder settings, resolution, bit rate, and encoding parameters. Twitch will assess and validate these parameters with a focus on quality of the connection, ensuring optimal settings. This makes streaming easier for content creators by taking care of complicated settings directly by Twitch, rather than the user.

Using the dedicated NVENC hardware encoder, streamers can achieve the highest quality video on Twitch, with minimal impact to app and game performance.

In addition to this, there is the future possibility of using one of the newest codecs in the video ecosystem, AV1. This codec offers better quality compared to other codecs such as AVC and HEVC. Twitch are working on experimenting with AV1 support to be powered by multiple client-side encodes. Initially, this will be exclusively available to NVIDIA RTX 40xx GPUs.

You can opt-in to the beta at dashboard.twitch.tv/broadcast.