Where Are We Now: Streaming eSports (And More)

The race for live streaming dominance has been heating up in the past few weeks. At F8, Facebook made an even bigger splash by unveiling a suite of API capabilities that will allow for direct streaming through traditional broadcast means. They weren’t necessarily the first, though. Most people recall Meerkat, which broke out at SXSW, only to pivot one year later. And Periscope, Twitter’s offering, will likely see an increase in NFL content thanks to the deal they struck earlier this month.And while those platforms have all been making some noise, there’ another, older that’s recently made some news of its own around eSports - Stre.am. Stre.am’s CMO Will Jamieson, was one of the founders of YikYak and now is hoping to do for streaming what they did for proximity messaging.Stre.am is focused on general business-to-business activations with clients like Volvo and the Jacksonville Jaguars (an activation they had going before Meerkat and Periscope entered the space), but right now they are making a strategic bet in the realm of eSports, explicitly mobile eSports. Mobile games, like the MOBA titan Vainglory, are a particular challenge for the eSports space as there isn’t an easy or timely way to stream them. Jamieson noted that, “the reason we did it is because we saw a huge market gap with the companies that were implementing solutions. None of them were able to offer a solution that was light weight and offered low latency. Their competition was either iOS only and required you to hook up your computer with third party cords or had a 30 to 40 second latency.”In any sport, a 30 second lag can be fatal, but for an eSports property, the game can shift completely in that time period. “It can’t happen,” Jamieson notes. “It’s a bad experience for all parties.” So he set about to create a solution that didn’t require non-traditional cords and got the latency down to two seconds.With the recent launch of their white label solution, they now have the ability to create channels with specific categories, “which will allow for much better discovery and building of content.” Vainglory hasn’t started advertising their use yet, but now that these channels exist, that could change. “The community appreciates the low latency,” mused Jamieson. “They know the technology and they get that this is something difficult to do.”Jamieson feels that the entire streaming space needs to work on its discovery mechanisms. There needs to be an easier way for users to find content, regardless of what platform they’re on, to allow for something akin to channel surfing. Jamieson hopes that Stre.am’s channels and enterprise capabilities can help here, but for the live content arena on the whole, discovery remains an issue.