Streaming gets ‘beamed’ up to a new mixer-upper
Once upon a time, there was a wee livestreaming doo-hickey on Xbox and Windows 10 called Beam. The service featured interactive streams though XP-spending buttons and other tools that made watching streams a bit more than simply watching them and attempting to catch up with the stream chat box.
Beam was acquired by Microsoft in August 2016 and today has been treated to a new lick of paint.
Mixer adds a few new features to go along with the rebranding. Co-streaming is one such feature, allowing up to four people to come together and game on one stream. This will be a pretty cool feature to watching multiplayer streams. From my point of view, whilst it’s fun to watch a party play together, they’re often only from one person’s point of view. This co-streaming feature will be a pretty nifty addition I believe
App-tastic!
Next up is the announcement of an app for streamers. The Mixer Create app will allow streamers to keep the conversation going outside of the streaming studio and out into the great wild world. the idea eventually is for game streaming from mobile devices, but that will come soon in an app that is currently in the beta stage.
The app is currently publicly available on Android and by invite on iOS through the TestFlight scheme.
Front and centre!
If you hadn’t seen much of  Beam in your day-to-day Xbox gaming, then that will soon change. Mixer will be more prominently featured on the Xbox One dashboard. Initially coming out for those of you on the Xbox Insiders program, curated streams will feature prominently on the Mier section to help you find your next stream to watch.
If you fancy giving Mixer a try, then it’ll be used by Microsoft to broadcast their E3 briefing in 4K UHD, so long as you have the kit for it.
