Twitch And YouTube Fighting Over E3 Streaming

Read original story on: The Verge & Variety

The E3, (short for Electronic Entertainment Expo), the CES for the video gaming industry, is currently underway. All giants in the gaming industry and adjacent are coming out with big announcements, vying for the attention and wallets of all gamers worldwide. But on a smaller scale, a fight for eyeballs is also playing out between Amazon-backed Twitch and Google-owned YouTube, which we anticipated weeks ago.

Last Friday, YouTube timely announced the imminent launch of YouTube Gaming, a brand new app and website carting specifically to gamers with features that sound exactly like Twitch’s offerings. E3 offers YouTube a great opportunity to start gaining traction among the gaming community, and the leading online video site is a shiny new E3 hub, which features “a 12-hour live stream marathon” filled with gamer interviews, commentary from YouTube stars, as well as exclusive demos of the newly announced games.

As the de-facto streaming site for video gameplays, Twitch enjoys an inherent advantage given its audience demo and platform focus. Besides the standard wall-to-wall live coverage of the E3 events, it will also, for the first time, allow users to “co-stream” all of Twitch’s broadcasts from the convention, so as to broaden the reach of its user-generated content and enrich its streams. It will be interesting to see how Twitch holds up against YouTube’s attacks, especially considering Google was reportedly set to acquire Twitch for $1 billion before backing out due to alleged conflicts with YouTube.

 

 

Playstation TV Coming This Year

Just when you thought you had a handle on all the over-the-top platforms, Playstation announces the North America release of Playstation TV. The $99 device will stream PS Vita and select PS 3 games to your TV in addition to media services like Hulu and Netflix. More importantly, it enables remote play for current PS4 owners who can stream games to additional TVs without the need to move their main console. 

Eye Tracking For Gaming Is Just the Start

At this week’s E3 convention, SteelSeries is showing off its new Sentry Eye Tracker, a device designed to track where a gamer looks while playing. This primary function can offer insights when training for gaming tournaments, but it is promising in a much wider range of fields.  Tobii, a Swedish company that supplies the tracking technology for the Sentry, sees its technology being used to assist people with disabilities, conduct academic research, and track attention for market research.  It is likely we will soon see PCs coming to market with this sort of technology baked in, so it stands to reason that we will be seeing more and more applications of eye tracking in the next few years.

Microsoft’s E3 Press Conference

Microsoft’s E3 Conference can be defined more by what it didn’t say than what it did. There was no mention of the once requisite Kinect, social media integration or video. Instead, the tech giant focused on showcasing their major game partners like Halo 5 and Call of Duty which of course look stunning in the gameplay demos. 

E3 – Hits and Misses

E3 2009 is my fifth E3, though I managed to miss the recent “awkward years.”  While the rumor was that this E3 would return to prior glory, I’ve been a bit disappointed – the show is much more guarded than in years past.  The press conferences on Monday and Tuesday had some neat surprises, but few of those surprises managed to make it out to the show floor. Continue reading “E3 – Hits and Misses”