going 4k would make competing multistreams also go 4k as right now rules are in place so that Youtube streams can't be higher quality over Twitch if you multistream.

Honestly 2K looks perfect and 4K is really overkill for streaming. Even with Enhanced Broadcasting, most viewers won't be able to handle watching 4K yet. Once AV1 rolls out in the next year or so, it’ll be far better than HEVC and finally make Higher Res streams practical at way lower bitrates.

I am in favor of AV1, but I doubt it'll be rolling out in near future : problem is, low adoption rate of AV1-able HW, even if *just* for decoding, LOTS of mobile devices can't do it & PCs need RTX30/RX6000 or Intel 11th/Ryzen 6000 or later hardware to do it, which is not a given for a lot of people.

How widespread was this test? I've seen a few 2k streams, but not a single 4k

It was literally an alpha test

And I was literally asking how widespread was it.

Those were 4k. 1080p is 2k.

1440 is 2K.

1080p = 1920x1080 = 2k 1440p = 2560x1440 = 2.5k 2160p = 3840x2160 = 4k

We're dealing with consumer markets here; the DCI spec is an entirely different thing, 1080vl is only 2K for cinema aspect ratio. For 16:9 2K is 2560 x 1440.

Intredasting... Too much bandwidth usage? Excessive transcoding requirements on the backend? Not enough 4k displays out there to be worth offering at this time? Would love to know the reasoning.

Expensive as fuck to host servers that allow such wide on-demand low-latency streams, and not exactly profitable as-is.. I would guess that having to up the capacity to allow for 4k without sufficiently offsetting the increased operating costs itself might be the reasoning there

Considering that local rendering of 4K games is also not realistic. It will look good, but you are forever stuck at or under 30 to 60 FPS. This is assuming GPUs companies get their shit together and actually render the frames instead of AI upscale shit.

plus, with compression, it's not like 4K will look *that* good so really is there any benefit to it ? 1440p is beneficial because there's noticeable difference to 1080p, 4K suffers from diminishing returns amen to that second half, fuck AI rendered shit, Nvidia can burn to the ground for all I care

Makes sense to me. 4k Is completely unnecessary (at time of writing) and there's much better places to focus those same resources... though the cynic in me says they won't actually be put to better use. But we can live in eternal hope, right? 😅

Makes sense, given how glitchy and hard to watch most of the 2K streams I've seen are, no need to make it worse by doubling the resolution, and those massively increasing encoding requirements.