Microsoft’s Streaming Service Beam Gets a New Name and New Features

Written by Brandon Hofer on May 25, 2017

News: Beam is no more as Microsoft has renamed it Mixer and also revealed some of their plans for this new streaming service.

Microsoft’s new streaming service Beam has a new name. It is now called Mixer and is set to bring about some pretty cool features. The reason for the name change is that the team over at Microsoft apparently felt like that they couldn’t successfully expand to all of the major global markets with “Beam” and now “Mixer” will allow them to do that. For those who never used or even heard of Beam (now Mixer) it is a streaming service similar to Twitch. You can stream your games on there and interact with your community in the chat room as you play your game. In my personal experience Beam worked better than Twitch. The delay between when the streamer would do something and when chat could respond is almost nonexistent on Mixer and I like how the chat window is transparent and (for me) on the lower right portion of the screen so it doesn’t cover too much of the action. On your Xbox One you can change that if you want so you can put that chat window on the top left of the screen, in the middle, bottom left or wherever is most convenient for you.

One of the big new features for Mixer is being released and has a ton of potential. I believe Microsoft is the first company to have this and it is the ability to co-stream. What this feature does is allow up to four people to combine their streams into a single viewer utilizing split screen with one chat room. So I could be playing Ghost Recon Wildlands with three of my friends and utilizing this co-streaming feature you could see all four perspectives. You could watch what I’m doing on the top left (for example) or you could see what is going on from my friend’s perspective on the bottom or whatever the case may be. It is a really cool idea and should be a great way to view some eSports competition such as Call of Duty when you have a team like Optic Gaming playing. It should be noted however that while that all sounds good you aren’t limited to playing the same game. I could be playing Ghost Recon Wildlands while my friend is playing Overwatch and another friend is playing Stardew Valley and we would all still share the same centralized chat room and everything. Additionally the streams don’t all have to come from the same source. You can have a mixture of people streaming from their PC, Xbox One or their mobile device. While this feature is available right now on PC it will be coming to Xbox One soon, in the coming weeks.

Microsoft also revealed that they are going to have a 24/7 curated channel that will always be online and moderated by Microsoft. This will be called “Channel One” and could potentially feature some special events as well as some gameplay or whatever Microsoft wants to put on the channel. While they didn’t announce anything for E3 my personal speculation would be that E3 would be a fantastic coming out party for the service to show what it could do.

In addition to all of that there is a new mobile app for both iOS and Android (although not for Windows Phone apparently) that is currently in beta. This app at the moment only allows you to basically broadcast yourself right now but in the future it will allow you to stream some gameplay as well. One potentially big use for this would be someone playing Pokemon Go and streaming it through Mixer and using that as a way to hunt Pokemon with viewers.

Check out the video that Microsoft released below and tell us what you think. Will you being using the Mixer service? What do you think about the co-streaming option? Do you think others such as Twitch and/or Youtube will come up with a similar feature?