Question / Help Big Problems with OBS

[Cryonic]

Providers everywhere in the world work together, thats the core idea behind the whole network.
The only problem that might make it impossible, is just the pure ignorance. If one or more ISP decide to not give a single flying **** about a problem and you are forced to use them - you are screwed. Sometimes even a VPN can help, changing the routing might improve the performance. One of my friends is actually streaming from Russia to Frankfurt Germany over a VPN in NL if i remember it correctly. Somethere deep in the north Europe :-) And he gets around 70mbit/s (up & down) out of that VPN, so more than enough for streaming.

 

[FerretBomb]

The problem is, you're giving people bad advice based on how things SHOULD be.

We're trying to advise people on how to work within the technical limitations of the current REALITY, to make the most of the situation.

You need to make things as easy as possible for people to watch you.
*Expecting* them to put out effort beyond a single click cuts yourself off at the knees as far as growth is concerned.
If you want to be watchable by a wide audience, you have to make it easy to watch you. Especially as a smaller streamer, you need every possible advantage. If you put your nose up your... well... somewhere, and *refuse* to make compromises, you'll end up alone or with a very small number of viewers, especially before Partnership.

You may not be interested in growth, but many streamers, especially small or new streamers, ARE as their main aim; Partnership is based on concurrent viewership primarily, and getting that volume of viewership is the first step. After you have quality options, you can crank things to 11 all you want.

Hitbox is a joke at the moment, by the way. You can go and count (manually) the viewership during primetime hours... and it's less in entirety than a middle-range League streamer's average viewers. Once they start getting the volume Twitch has, they'll be forced to change, as the model simply doesn't scale past a certain point.

 

[Cryonic]

The reality is: i also watch streams. And if i see a low quality stream (and you CANT make 2000bitrate stream look good without throwing at least 12 cores and a slow movement game at it), i go to the next one. So do my friends, we are mostly enthusiasts and streamers so we know what is possible etc.
Sure, growth is good, but if there are like 150 streamers, people a) will never go to the bottom and b) if by any chance people actually find that stream, it should look as good as possible, with great audio, everything synced, all bells and whistles. Because people dont know the streamer and never will if it looks like in the 90s and hurt the eyes. Believe me, i see hundreds of streams every day that are unwatchable. That would have been OK 10 years ago, but not today.
Ferret, i have a similar system like you, just a bit lower (970, 16GB DDR4, no capture card blah). Not to make money with it, just to have fun and being able to stream 1080p 60FPS 4 fun.
I also do youtube videos around that theme, mostly in russian - specially for the russian scene that is huge, but lacks quality in many places.
And Hitbox and other services have low viewer count but better tech. solutions for streamers and interesting things like stats etc. Nobody said to switch, but you know it is possible to set up a stream to multiple sites, include them in a single chat and that works even with low upload. I pay for my own VPS running nginx to make it happen, just because my upload is limited :-)

Streaming for me was always about crazy enthusiastic guys sitting in the basement and working with expensive and rare toys for our pleasure. Since then it turned into a huge moneyprinting machine with boobs on top of it, but the core is still the same. Some streamers push the technology forward without having the greatest audience, most of them spend more than they get in terms of money.

And the reality for me is: its almost 2016, its hot like hell outside (Germany goddamn, not Jamaica, give me some snow!) and we enjoy high res content.
The only thing keeping me away from a 4K monitor is the current limitation of that resolution, specially for streaming...

 

[FerretBomb]

720p looking good at 2000kbps? Yes, you can do that.
Great or close to pixel perfect? No, of course it's not.
But you just write off the people who demand DVD+ quality, because it's not realistically feasible when you're starting out.

Growth is key if you don't want to be at the bottom of that 150 streamers forever.

It can "hurt" the eyes, so long as it's still entertaining enough. A great artist can bring incredible beauty out of a cheap #2 pencil, and a crappy one won't turn out masterpieces if they have the most expensive art supplies in the world.

If you're streaming just for fun and don't care about growth, then fine! But please don't tell new streamers who ARE looking to grow, to develop a community, and want to progress to use the settings you are, because it absolutely WILL harm them; it will cripple their growth at the least, and could cause some to just get disheartened and outright quit, seeing no progress thanks to the settings making it so almost no one can watch them.

That's great. YT isn't a real-time environment (Gaming aside). You don't have to make tradeoffs there, as you aren't working in real-time.

Yes, you can multi-stream (unless you end up Partnered). But that doesn't change the fact that Twitch is currently the most populous offering, with the best chance to start getting viewers as there are viewers TO get. So that's what you set up your settings to cater toward.

The thing is, most of those DON'T "push the technology forward". Technology is always advancing... they aren't pulling it. The mainstream simply develops to that point eventually on its own.
For example, yes, eventually 4K will be the standard. The folks streaming at it right now are a tiny niche. Eventually it will become prevalent, whether they were streaming at it or not. Frankly, they're essentially irrelevant as far as encouraging its eventual adoption, and the only people watching them are from that relatively small pool of other early adopters.

Yes. It's almost 2016, and a majority of viewers can't watch smoothly at 3500kbps.

 

[Cryonic]

Well this is sad. Since everything goes towards 4K, new technology in the next 1-2 years (Broadwell-E CPUs, Pascal, Zen, possibly the follower of the Fury AMD cards) and increased internet speed (100mbit/s are common here in bigger cities and even small villages, we see new faster and cheaper connections daily - even in Germany - and this country is well known for being slow in that department) - everything will help to move on from 1080p to 4K as the new standart.
The only thing needed is bitrate - a shit ton of bitrate. A huge jump in resolution like that sets the requirement for video bitrates really high. Being at the cutting edge of the technology, helping with development is always hard, we have to fight everything and everyone. This is why a big group of people demanding support for high bitrate streaming will help us more than every piece of new hardware that we can get our hands on.