New experiments with transcripts, plus game streaming and social platforms

From Extra Crunch Apologies – yesterday’s daily got stuck on a plane from LAX and never sent out. This is your combined Tuesday + Wednesday editions. New Experiment: The Bold Italic’s popular podcast This is Your Life in Silicon Valley is a mainstay on playlists in the Bay Area. Given the popularity of Equity’s transcripts, […]

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The 9 biggest questions about Google’s Stadia game streaming service

Google’s Stadia is an impressive piece of engineering to be sure: Delivering high definition, high framerate, low latency video to devices like tablets and phones is an accomplishment in itself. But the game streaming services faces serious challenges if it wants to compete with the likes of Xbox and PlayStation, or even plain old PCs and smartphones. Here are our 9 biggest questions about the new platform.

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Google scores a custom AMD GPU to power its Stadia cloud gaming hardware

Google’s new Stadia game streaming service may be great for people who don’t own a powerful PC or console, but those games have to run somewhere — specifically, in a Google datacenter. And the hardware they run on will be largely powered by a custom graphics card from AMD that, on paper at least, puts the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X to shame.

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Microsoft’s game streaming service Mixer adds more ways for streamers to make money

Microsoft today is rolling out a new version of its game streaming service, Mixer, which it’s calling “Season 2” to reflect the fact that the changes are ongoing, not a one-day release. The company says it’s specifically investing in new areas around expression, monetization, and creator communities. The first of these, called Skills, are focused […]

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Twitch announces group streaming and a karaoke game for its 1M concurrent viewers

The teens were out in force today in San Jose for the annual TwitchCon game-streaming conference. There, Twitch announced that at any given time, 1 million people are watching it (up from 746,000 last year), and it seemed like many game lovers were at TwitchCon in person to meet some of the nearly half-million web […]

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Google gets into game streaming with Project Stream and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in Chrome

Earlier this year, we heard rumors that Google was working on a game streaming service. Now, it looks like those rumors were true. The company today unveiled ‘Project Stream” and while Google calls this a “technical test” to see how well game streaming to Chrome works, it’s clear that this is the foundational technology for […]

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Twitch streamers can now let viewers react with GIFs

Giphy is coming to Twitch . For the first time, Giphy is bringing its library of animated GIFs to the Amazon-owned game streaming service. The company today is launching a Giphy extension for Twitch streamers that will allow viewers to react in real-time using GIFs during a broadcast. The idea is that GIFs could make […]

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Microsoft’s Twitch rival Mixer gets a revamp, including new developer tools for interactive gameplay

Microsoft is celebrating the one-year anniversary of its game streaming service and Twitch competitor, Mixer, with a host of new features, including a refresh of the user experience and the launch of an expanded developer toolkit called MixPlay. The new streamer tools will roll out along with the revamped version of Mixer .com across desktop and […]

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Microsoft partners with Lightstream Studio to bring customization tools to Mixer streamers

Microsoft’s Twitch competitor, Mixer, is giving streamers a new way to customize their channels. The company has entered into a partnership with Lightstream Studio to allow Mixer streamers to add images, overlays, transitions, and text to their streams, or to switch between scenes. The goal is to make it easier for creators to give their […]

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Mixer, Microsoft’s Twitch competitor, adds game sales

 Twitch has long since allowed its streamers to generate revenue from their channels through things like subscriptions, virtual tipping, and game sales. Today, Microsoft is adopting one of those features for its own game streaming service, Mixer, with today’s launch of “Direct Purchase.” The addition will allow streamers to promote purchases – including game titles and… Read More

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Chinese game streaming platform Chushou raises Series D, adds Google as investor

 Google has added Chinese mobile game livestreaming platform Chushou to its list of investments in Asia. The Beijing-based startup announced today that it has closed a Series D round, which Google joined as a new investor, that brings its total funding so far to over $120 million. Chushou’s previous investors Qiming Venture, Shunwei Capital and Alpha X Capital, also returned for this round. Read More

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