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How Game Streaming Works
Follow a live game broadcast from capture on the player's machine through encoding and delivery to the screen of a viewer, and see where delays and quality limits come from.
Creators and Access
Streaming and Creators
How games are shown, shared and talked about online.
Bitrate and Encoding for Streams
Learn what bitrate means, how video compression squeezes a game stream into limited bandwidth, and why picture quality depends on how much data you can send.
Chat, Emotes and Stream Culture
Learn how live stream chat works as a shared space, why emotes and in-jokes spread so quickly, and how the customs of a channel form around its community.
How Cloud Gaming Works
See how cloud gaming runs a game on a remote machine and sends video to your screen, why latency and bandwidth decide the experience, and what it can and cannot do.
How Game Reviews Work
Understand how critics play, weigh and score games, why two reviewers can disagree, and how to read reviews and scores as one informed opinion among several.
How Lets Play Videos Became a Genre
Trace how recording a game with spoken commentary grew from forum posts and screenshots into a widely recognised online video format, and what defines the style.
How Moderation Works in Streams and Games
Learn the rules, human moderators and automated tools that online communities use to manage behavior in stream chats and multiplayer games, and where they fall short.
What a Capture Card Does
Understand how a capture card copies the video signal from a console or another computer into a PC, why it is needed for streaming and recording, and what affects the result.
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