The power of live streaming! Become a live streaming broadcaster with Plextor’s SSDs

With the popularity of eSports and the rapid rise of video gaming generations, gamers start to follow tournaments and star players in addition to playing games themselves. Even casual games have gamers who do live streaming, which other gamers check out for relevant gaming tips and stage clearing tricks.

This is also the birth of a new business model, "live streaming economy," in the gaming industry. The so-called live streaming economy refers to the model in which gamers who run live streaming channels broadcast their gaming live online and interact with viewers, while also making money from advertisement. After achieving a certain amount of fame, they might even get the opportunity to endorse products. Now, even the internationally renowned online video website YouTube is targeting this market, and introduced YouTube Gaming, a channel dedicated exclusively to games. This just goes to show how popular "live streaming" has become in the web industry. Plextor, a leading developer of digital storage technology, makes great preparations with the most efficient solution to give your live streaming system a boost.

How to become a live streaming broadcaster?
What kind of hardware specification is necessary for gamers wishing to create live streaming channels? Before talking about the specifications, we will first briefly describe how live streaming works.

Gamers play games and capture game frames simultaneously through live streaming software; some of the gamers even use microphones or cameras to give vivid commentary on what is happening in the game. These frames and audio are transmitted to the Internet through live streaming platforms and live streamed synchronously for everyone to view.

The live streaming platform performs high-speed compression and encoding of all frames and audio. Therefore, performance of the following three computer components is crucial in completing the task:

1. CPU: We strongly recommend a quad-core CPU of 3GHz or higher, as the software puts intensive computational loads on the CPU during operation. Greater computational power guarantees more frames processed and finer image quality. Current live streaming software can fully tap into the computational power of a multi-core, multi-threading CPU. As a result, if computational power of a single-core is not sufficient, multi threading can be activated to aid computation. For high quality video and audio live stream, CPU performance is a key factor.
2. Memory: Basically, it goes without saying that the bigger the memory size, the better. Presently, 8G is recommended for a typical 64-bit operating system. For creating a live streaming platform, memory of 16 GB or more is recommended.
3. SSD: Due to increase of resolutions of streamed frames from 1080P to 4K, plus the necessity of synchronization between image and audio (asynchronous image and audio is a sure way to drive your audience away...), help from high speed SSD is needed. When live streaming platform needs to access a great volume of video and audio data in a short time, forget about traditional hard drives! Plextor's SSD drive is known for its superior performance, excellent quality and remarkable stability; even a Plextor entry-level model M6V SSD provides an access performance that is over twice as efficient as a conventional hard drive. This prevents the live streaming from freezing, and the overall performance of the computer won't be hindered by a slow storage device.

Lastly, we want to remind live streaming gamers that in addition to the computational power, don't neglect the performance of storage device for your live streaming platforms. After all, other than skills, image quality and resolution are matters of competition among broadcasters. Good live streaming platforms can bring a vivid experience to all audience, and are definitely a great help to broadcasters.

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