Microsoft surprised everyone when it acquired Beam, a video streaming, service back in August last year. The company promised to integrate the service into Xbox One and Windows 10 with time to provide gamers with a seamless streaming experience. The process of integration, it seems, is underway as the website was revamped recently.
The update brings a slew of new features that were highly requested by users of the service including a new faster HTML5-only video player, optional Xbox Live sign-in, and a UI refresh for the entire website. The video player now enables playback at up to 10Mbps and a maximum resolution of 1440p at 60fps. This update has been available to beta users for a while but is now available globally.
The update was announced by Matt Salsamendi, co-founder of Beam, who tweeted:
In December, the co-founder of the service had posted a blog giving a peek into the future of the service and more recently Mike Ybarra, Head of Platform Engineering for Xbox, told us what to expect with regards to the service with the upcoming Creators Update.
Beam has been a popular service for its low latency between streamers and their audiences, and the service has made improvements in terms of loading speeds, now “almost 5 times faster" with the latest update. Another interesting aspect of this update is Xbox Live (Microsoft Account) login authentication, although optional as of now, will become mandatory with a future update.
Additionally, ‘Beam 2.0’ includes various improvements such as a new UI for polling, a better deep chat experience, more robust network management, and a community-focused homepage.
Source: TechCrunch via MSPoweruser
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