Beam gets busy after Microsoft acquisition, plans announcements at TC Disrupt

Jack Wilkinson

Almost a month ago, Microsoft announced that they had acquired Beam, an interactive live streaming service for gaming. Beam works by allowing viewers to interact with the streamers game through a series of APIs that developers can hook into. It can offer viewers the chance to perform certain actions on behalf of the streamer or to suggest a method of completion.

Following Microsoft’s acquisition of Beam, the company has been working hard to ensure that its sudden growth and future growth forecasts don’t hinder its ability to provide an optimal experience, as well as bringing out several new features to its platform. Here’s a look at the progress Beam made during August.

After the announcement of its acquisition by Microsoft, Beam has seen exponential growth of 200%. This, as with any online service, can place a sudden weight on to the servers powering it behind the scenes. As such, Beam has made improvements to its infrastructure and has quadrupled its server capacity. they now have servers in Milan, Paris, Brazil, Sydney, Mexico, Hong Kong and Tokyo. On top of this, the service has doubled its current capacity in both the United States and European datacenters.

When it comes to new features, Beam has been hard at work and rolled out several new features for users to make use of:

Verified Accounts

To help decipher between legitimate streamers and imposters, Beam now offers a Verified badge for profiles. Once a user links their Beam account to Twitter and Discord, they will become verified.

Sub-second Viewer Count

Seeing how many viewers a stream has can be important to some people – especially when it is accurate. Beam recognises this and has made improvements to its viewer count system. The new system mitigates view bots, to prevent artificial inflation of viewer counts, as well as ensuring that the viewer count updates in sub-seconds, so it always shows the most accurate count possible.

Resizable Chat, Emote Tooltips, Xbox Emote

The chat can now be resized to the users’ preference. On top of this, there’s a new Xbox emote, which depicts an Xbox controller in the chat, as well as emote tooltips which show when hovering over an emote, so that it is clear what it is.

Sub-second Stream Delay

Beam is partnering with popular streaming clients such as XSplit and OBS to provide sub-second stream delay, which will begin releasing towards the end of September.

Beam will be at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on September 14, where they will begin to announce some “extremely exciting announcements.”