Why streams lag

In multiplayer games like League of Legends and Apex Legends, where fast reaction times are a requirement for being the best player, it can mean the difference between a triumphant win and a major defeat. If possible, connect your computer or laptop to your wireless Internet router using an Ethernet cable. Pause downloads such as game updates that may be running in the background and turn off background updating programs like Dropbox.

The first thing you can do is to lower the in-game settings. Your computer may not be capable of displaying a game at the highest frame-rate or resolution, which causes graphics lag. Other than your game, you may be running some graphics intensive programs in the background. Some graphics intensive programs are image editor Adobe Photoshop and software that uses large and complex spreadsheets.

Live for your stream management. By adding Activity Feed and Chat to OBS Studio, it also declutters your desktop and frees up some computing power, letting your computer put its all into your stream. In many cases, the pricing has become more fan-friendly too, as the NBA and Turner Sports have introduced single-game purchase options. The offerings are of higher quality and significantly more stable than they used to be as well, sometimes offering a superior experience compared to what you could get with a cable or antenna.

And yet! In the year , there remains one way in which our streams are still stuck in the past—literally. For the most part, online presentations of games run 15 seconds to a minute behind the traditional television broadcasts, which themselves air several seconds after live action.

Simple data can be transferred near instantaneously these days, allowing apps like Draftkings Sportsbook to offer pitch-by-pitch odds during the World Series that come in ahead of the play on broadcast television. Even still, Draftkings Sportsbook product lead Dan Hannigan-Daley says he does his best to avoid checking his roster during the action. Just ask Twitter. Beyond limiting viewing experiences, the streaming delay also has a psychological impact. One explanation for that: You know that you likely would have already heard about any truly incredible moments that could have transpired.

Either your phone is buzzing uncontrollably and the sense of shock is curbed, or the phone is silent, and nothing magical is on the way. Utter surprise or delight is impossible regardless. As connected as our world seems, the video still has miles to cover between the glass of a stadium camera and the screen of your viewing device, as well as a series of technical steps that get it there. After being captured, videos are transformed a few seconds at a time into a file format that can be sent across the internet.

Then, that video is replicated several times at different qualities, so it can be viewed smoothly with different internet connections. All of those copies are then deployed across a sequence of servers around the country. Individual devices then request the series of files, each a few seconds long, to load and play. In itself, the process can be completed rapidly.

The delay largely comes from computers at those steps waiting to have two or more chunks before passing one on to ensure the final product appears as a consistent stream rather than being regularly interrupted by a buffering bar.

Sometimes, though, latency is an issue. For example, live attendees might be tweeting updates, or you may be providing live score and stat info for a sporting event. If your latency is too long, viewers may read about something before they see and hear it happen, which is not ideal.

So we should try to keep the latency as low as possible. More advanced systems, such as video mixers, will introduce additional latency for decoding, processing, re-encoding, and retransmitting. Your video capture and processing requirements will determine this value. This latency can range from extremely low thousandths of a second to values closer to the duration of a video frame. Changing encoding parameters can lower this value at the expense of encoded video quality.

The encoded video takes time to transmit over the internet to a VDS. This latency is affected by the encoded media bitrate lower bitrate usually means lower latency , the latency and bandwidth of the internet connection, and the proximity over the internet to the VDS. Since the internet is a massively connected series of digital communication routes, the encoded video data may take one of many different routes to the VDS, and this route may change over time.

Because these routes take different amounts of time to traverse and the data may be queued anywhere along the route , it may arrive at the VDS out of order. A special software component called a jitter buffer reorders the arriving data so it can be properly decoded. When configuring the jitter buffer, one must choose a maximum time boundary inside of which data can be reordered.

This time boundary provides the latency of the jitter buffer. As the latency is lowered, the risk of losing late data increases — while choosing a higher latency ensures more late data is recovered.

In order to provide a quality viewing experience across a range of devices, a good streaming provider should provide ABR. As a streamer, upload and download is constantly in progress and thus falls on the list of things that are stopped by the antivirus software. There are two workarounds for this. Either you can switch it to gaming mode while streaming twitch or you can deactivate it.

The latter is an option for all antiviruses while the former is only applicable in new and updated antivirus software. Internet connection is a bigger problem and is comparatively difficult to know and solve. As a streamer, you have to be very careful about it. Having a good internet connection is a must and also to make sure that you are getting a consistent bandwidth throughout the day.

The best way to check your internet speed is by running a quick and simple speed test. Just check your internet through a speed test whenever you are going over to twitch. This speed test will give a good idea of how the internet is performing. If the internet connection is slower than expected then doing a few tweaks would greatly help. The reason Twitch won't load for you might also be related to issues in a specific country or territory.

There's a quick fix for that—simply use a VPN. Alternatively, if you already use a VPN, this might be the issue behind Twitch streams not loading. In such a case, you might disable your current VPN and see if anything changes for you. Probably the easiest step to take in finding a solution for Twitch lagging is to try using a different browser. If your twitch stops running for unknown reasons or doesn't even start then it's probably due to your browser.

Updating it is also a solution to the problem but if you are too lazy to do that then probably switching over to a different browser e. Firefox, Opera is the best thing for you. This mostly happens if you are using Chrome as your sole browser. Chrome is notorious for taking up a lot of memory and thus leaving little to nothing for your stream. You can simply solve this by going to your Chrome settings and turning off "hardware acceleration.

Twitch lagging mostly happens if you are using Chrome as your sole browser.