Twitch.tv, a live-streaming service for gamers, is working alongside Time Warner, a US-based ISP, to improve the quality of Twitch’s service.
In a disturbing trend, gamers have been noticing a decrease of quality when it comes to their online gaming services. Whether it’s playing online, downloading content, or watching tournaments, gamers seem to believe that ISPs are throttling users. Throttling, for those that are unaware, is when an ISP limits the bandwidth you’re allowed to have.
“We do our best to minimize buffering and other slowdowns at Time Warner Cable,” the company told Gamespot. “Our standard response has been a simple, ‘We don’t throttle traffic.’ That’s because we don’t.”
But the validity of this quote remains in question. “Time Warner has, for the last few months, been utterly dreadful for me, whose job it is to create online media,” John ‘Totalbiscuit’ Bain told Gamespot. “Ridiculous buffering across the board, massive packet loss to Twitch ingest servers and laggy stream viewing is not the kind of thing you should be experiencing on a 50/5 connection.”
“What’s the point in speed if you don’t have the reliability to back it up?”
Both Twitch and Time Warner Cable are reportedly working together to resolve these issues. Considering the continuing popularity of streaming, they’ll need to act fast. Gamers aren’t known for their patience.
Source: Gamespot.com