Last month, Beam, the streaming service
acquired by Microsoft many months ago, began to
roll out for Xbox Insiders last month. A couple of nights ago, the roll out finally reached me although to be honest, I'd forgot that I was even a part of the Xbox Insider Program. With Thursday being my second night off of the week, I'd planned on having a wonderfully peaceful few hours playing
Final Fantasy XV. With the option now available to stream with Beam, I thought I may as well give it a go!
Check me out!
Unlike
Twitch, which must now be opened up fully for the user to find the option to broadcast before the app snaps to the right like it used to, Beam is built in to the Xbox One's menu's. After a quick fiddle with the settings, I was good to go! Sadly, using the app itself meant that I couldn't set up any cool overlays or use a custom camera like
TrueAchievement and
WebChimp UK do for the
TrueGaming Network Beam streams. I had the option to use the Kinect but the auto-zoom on mine is very inconsistent and with gaming in the living room, I'm not as close to the TV as I used to be. I went ahead with just the Xbox One headset and streamed away!
I streamed for most of the night but didn't realise that I had to set an option for the streams to be kept as VODs after I'd finished. My first few attempts were a bit wasted really as I was pretty much streaming to myself besides when
Large Coffee hopped in for a bit.
All in all it was a decent experience. The layout was nice, the little overlay was useful as it showed me how long I'd been broadcasting, how many viewers were watching, if my mic and camera were on or off, and also, there was an option to show a little bit of the chat too which would be incredibly useful if I didn't have my laptop set up next to me! There was just one seriously annoying issue that happened at least four times in the 5-6 hour period I was streaming, and that was that the stream would just magically cut out after roughly an hour or so of streaming for no apparent reason! There'd be no visible effort to reconnect, no warning, no notification, no nothing unless you either had your laptop/cpu open to know it had gone off, or you'd noticed that the Beam overlay had disappeared. However, if I'd had a viewer filled stream, I would've been able to quickly tell the viewers what had gone on and get straight back into the stream.
Beam's pretty cool but obviously it's early days yet. I don't really know how I'll roll in the future with streaming as I have more of a following on Twitch (64 followers
). Although at the same time, I'm not a serious streamer and I don't take it seriously enough anyway to be fussed which one I use. So long as I have at least one viewer (that's not me on the laptop
), I'm happy.
I may try again with some more FFXV next week in the early hours of Friday morning at roughly 12:30-1am GMT-0 if anyone would like to join me for my relaxing and long adventure!
Thanks guys!