Livestreaming takes a lot. In addition to the skill you need to have and an on-screen personality that attracts and entertains audiences, you need a setup that’s ready to run your games, capture all the footage, and deliver that all on a streaming platform like Twitch. With all that, you can face some challenges with stream quality that could make even the best stream hard to fully enjoy for your audiences.
Both your upstream bandwidth and the downstream bandwidth of your viewers can impact the quality of your streams. Fortunately, NVIDIA and Twitch collaborated to develop Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting, enabling multiple video streams at different resolutions and bitrates to be sent from NVIDIA GeForce RTX PCs or RTX workstations. This ensures viewers get the highest-quality video their internet connection can support.
Twitch’s Automatic Stream Configuration tool even helps you sort out the ideal settings to use without the need to understand different video codecs and bitrates or go through extensive testing to see what will work best for you.
These streams are about to get even better, too. An important part of the stream quality is the encoder used, and Twitch is about to add the HEVC codec in closed beta for streamers. The effect using this codec has with the NVIDIA encoder is substantial. It’s able to provide a 25% efficiency improvement, which translates directly to the stream quality. In other words, viewers will be able to watch streams in higher quality, with fewer artifacts and encoding errors at the same bitrate they receive today. This also means more viewers can tap into higher-resolution and higher-frame rate viewing.
Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting is just the start of the extra enhancement you can get for your livestreams using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX PC or RTX workstation. An NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card can already help you run your games at higher qualities so that gameplay looks great. NVIDIA Broadcast further taps into the AI power of your RTX graphics processor to provide major enhancement to the rest of your stream without the need for special equipment.
For video captured by your webcam, NVIDIA Broadcast can provide virtual background effects, letting you blur your background, replace it with something else, or put your game footage behind you as though you were on a green screen — without having to buy a green screen for the effect. The app can also set the camera to pan and zoom to follow your face. It can adjust your eyes so they always appear to be looking at the camera. And it’s able to improve the overall picture quality of your video by running a noise reduction to make for a cleaner picture even in darker settings.
You can’t ignore your audio either, and neither does NVIDIA Broadcast. It provides enhancements that ensure your voice comes through loud and clear. Noise removal can eliminate distracting background noise using the power of AI. And when you're in a quiet space, sometimes your own voice can become an issue, creating an echo in the room. In that case, NVIDIA Broadcast’s Room Echo Removal tool can sort you out.
With these features working together, you can effectively get a basic webcam and microphone to work like a streaming studio setup with a greenscreen, gimbal-mounted camera, and advanced audio setup.
Learn more about Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting here and the NVIDIA Broadcast app is free to download for NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU owners.
