A really interesting topic was brought to ITG’s attention just the other day when we were asked “why would anyone ever switch their stream over to Hitbox?” We decided to investigate this matter and inform you what the Hitbox hype is really all about.
Twich.tv is the most known and used streaming platform for gamers worldwide, but is it really the best? New streaming services are popping up, and we think we’ve found the best one yet! Hitbox.tv while much younger and smaller than Twitch, is really showing its potential with some really awesome features.
The first bold move Hitbox made, setting itself apart, was to use HTML rather than the Flash plugin. What does this mean for you as a viewer and a streamer? Well HTML is A LOT faster and more responsive than Flash. Count the time it takes you to load twitch and view their highlighted broadcast and compare it to hitbox. We did it ourselves and found that Twitch averaged about 6 second to start the broadcast while hitbox averaged a much smaller 2 seconds. Not only does it load faster, but with hitbox you actually get to watch a LIVEstream. The average latency (streamer to viewer) on hitbox is about 3 seconds. Compare that to twitch and you see a 400% increase in the average time it takes to view the livestream, a number Twitch shouldn’t be proud of.
One of our favorite features Hitbox excels in is their mobile app. After using their mobile app for a couple of days we’ve found it much easier to use and the experience to be much more enjoyable. We’ve also found their chat to be much more enjoyable and interactive. We we’re lucky enough to find this gem of an interview with the CEO of Hitbox Martin Klimscha that describes the Hitbox chat.
Klimscha: We really want to build interactivity into this live streaming experience. So that starts with real time interactivity, but what we’re also doing is enabling features that people can participate in. We want to make the viewers kind of like content creators; they can take part in polls for example. There are plenty of options in the chat, which is a proprietary chat system that we developed from scratch. It’s based on websockets and HTML5 instead, which is really state of the art, and enables a lot of options. You can embed a video, you can post GIFs, and the poll system is integrated right into the chat where people can vote straight away, so if the broadcaster asks “Which champion should I play next?”, people can vote live. There’s also a giveaway system built in, and we have plenty more in the pipeline too. So it’s all about interactivity, and making viewers take part.
Both Twitch and Hitbox have a variety of games for everyone to enjoy along with an easy subscription service to support your favorite streamers so they both get an A+ in that aspect.
Hitbox also allows users to stream at their highest possible output. Not limiting a streamers bitrate allows for more 60fps and 1080p streams for us to enjoy.
The biggest difference we found between the two was their customer support. After talking to Zachary Edwards CEO of The Money Matches and a streamer from both services, here is what he had to say about the support, and his overall enjoyment:
ITG: You mentioned you’ve encountered problems on both platforms. If you could, please elaborate a bit on the problems and what went down:
Edwards: “So like I said we originally streamed on Twich.tv and all seemed like it was going well. We had a consistant 500 people in the stream and got 200-300 followers daily. A lot of our viewers were asking why we didn’t have a sub button, (sub buttons not only support the streamer, but some revenue goes to twitch as well) so we recommended that they email Twitch and find out. Twitch got over 100 emails in under a half hour and they instantly banned us. We asked why and they told us that we broke the ‘spam rule’ and we realized we did and publicly apologized. We were ready to wait out our ban and get back to streaming when an intern got on twitter and started tweeting things about us being ‘giveaway whores’ and a whole lot of other crap. We weren’t too fond of their staff treating us like that and eventually Twitch closed our channel because of our arguments.”
“Here’s our encounter with Hitbox. I was having a issue with my Hitbox page not loading and I couldn’t read my chat so I sent out a tweet to their support page. Within a couple of minutes I had their Co-Owner along with some upper level staff working with my tech team and streamers to help fix the problem.”
Money Matches isn’t the only one Hitbox has been helping. Popular streamer Gross Gore who was banned from Twitch for voicing his opinion on another streamer has found his new home in the comfort of Hitbox.tv
With support like this and all these extra features for your viewing pleasure, it might be time to make the switch like many others streamers over to Hitbox.tv.
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