Microsoft announced today, in an official blog post, that the company has acquired the live-streaming service Beam Interactive.
Beam is an interactive platform that allows viewers to participate in live-streams by allowing them to interact with the streamers in a number of ways. For example, as explained in the video below, a streamer who is playing Minecraft could have his viewers participate in the stream by giving them the power to provide the streamer with weapons, tools or other challenges in real time, in order to affect the gameplay.
While a lot of other streaming services only focus on viewing, Beam provides low latency interactivity and has “sub-second stream delay’. Sub-second delay streaming ensures that the time it takes between the streamer doing something, and that action reaching viewers is around two hundred milliseconds. Beam also provides developers with software development kits so that they can add interactive buttons to help with streaming
According to Beam Interactive CEO, Matt Salsamendi, “Beam is designed to work with any game, and we’ll continue to offer broadcasts across all gaming platforms, just as we do today. As Beam becomes part of Team Xbox, you’ll see awesome new features, epic new interactive game integrations, and a huge influx of new community members!”
Although details about the acquisition such as the price have not been revealed, Microsoft was also among the bidders for the Twitch acquisition back in 2014. And now that the company finally has a streaming platform under it’s wing, all that’s left is to wait and see what they intend to do.
