I don’t pretend to get the whole streaming of people playing video games thing — I’d rather watch a tour of Twitch’s HQ
than watch Twitch itself — but apparently it’s something the kids are
increasingly down with. That probably explains why Amazon paid nearly $1 billion to acquire the largest video game streaming site on the planet.
And because Twitch has rightly grabbed most of the headlines, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was the only game in town, when in actual fact there are a number of other video streaming platforms aimed at gamers, such as HitBox, along with more general video sites, from YouTube to uStream, which are also finding a home amongst gamers.
Enter Restream.io, a self-funded startup from Ukraine that’s built a cloud service to let you stream your video gaming sessions (or any video feed) to multiple video sites all at once, without the additional CPU and bandwidth overhead that is normally required.
The service is currently free to use — though CEO and co-founder Alexander Khuda tells me it will likely evolve into a freemium offering of some kind, should Restream take off — and is aimed at those who see the value in not putting all their video streaming eggs in one basket, in recognition that, although skewed towards major players such as Twitch and YouTube, the audience for online video is still fragmented.
Specifically, Khuda says his startup is aiming to solve two problems:
How to expand your audience by streaming to a number of platforms in
parallel. “It’s difficult if you want to do it by yourself at home,” he
says, noting that most people don’t have sufficient bandwidth to upload
several high quality video streams at the same time. And secondly, how
to “play it safe” in case one of the platforms goes down midstream. To
that end, Restream currently supports streaming to 15 video sites at
once.
But it’s not just video streaming gamers who could benefit. “Our users are gamers, radio broadcasters, DJs, video bloggers. And we hope the number of segments will increase,” says Khuda.
And because Twitch has rightly grabbed most of the headlines, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was the only game in town, when in actual fact there are a number of other video streaming platforms aimed at gamers, such as HitBox, along with more general video sites, from YouTube to uStream, which are also finding a home amongst gamers.
Enter Restream.io, a self-funded startup from Ukraine that’s built a cloud service to let you stream your video gaming sessions (or any video feed) to multiple video sites all at once, without the additional CPU and bandwidth overhead that is normally required.
The service is currently free to use — though CEO and co-founder Alexander Khuda tells me it will likely evolve into a freemium offering of some kind, should Restream take off — and is aimed at those who see the value in not putting all their video streaming eggs in one basket, in recognition that, although skewed towards major players such as Twitch and YouTube, the audience for online video is still fragmented.
But it’s not just video streaming gamers who could benefit. “Our users are gamers, radio broadcasters, DJs, video bloggers. And we hope the number of segments will increase,” says Khuda.