Mixer, formerly known as Beam and Microsoft’s streaming platform service has been on a roll as of lately.
The tweaks made to FTL (Faster Than Light Protocol) over time have made it my preferred place to stream games. They’ve slowly updated their look, started advertising to get the word out about their services and have maintained focus on its community. They’ve even introduced Hypezones, which randomly selects a streamer who’s on the verge of winning or losing a game in PUBG and Fortnite. And now, they’ve made a change that should help get more streamers in the spotlight.
For those who don’t use Mixer, they have a section called “Featured”. This grants random streamers the ability to get seen as soon as anyone goes to Mixer, via the website and the Xbox One. It potentially can bring a vast amount of viewers and followers to the broadcaster. However, the downside of this was that the same streamers were being featured over and over. Meaning the larger streamers kept getting featured, while smaller ones weren’t getting noticed.
Thanks to a recent change, this should be a thing of the past. According to Matt Salsamendi, Co-Founder of Mixer, this new change will show more streamers some love. Now, once anyone is featured, they’ll be placed on a one-week cooldown. The plan is to give more people a chance to be featured as the rotation will be more varied.
Today we updated the Mixer homepage algorithm with some important changes to featuring. Once featured, there’s now a 1 week cooldown before a channel can be featured again. This means more content featured each day, and more up and coming broadcasters getting love. <3
— Matt (@MattSalsamendi) February 14, 2018
As someone who uses Mixer, this is a welcomed change. The platform has a lot of talent and interesting streamers, with many of them simply not being seen. While this can be attributed to the smaller audience that Mixer has. It didn’t help that they weren’t being seen thanks to the previous algorithm that was in place.
Hopefully, the change will give everyone an equal footing. Leaving it up the streamer once featured to show the Mixer community if they have what it takes to earn a follow.
Mixer, formerly known as Beam, was started by Matt Salsamendi and James Boehm on Jan 5, 2016. Shortly afterward, on August 11, 2016, the service was acquired by Microsoft. The next year, the Beam name was changed to Mixer, as the prior name couldn’t be used globally. The service is native to Windows 10 and the Xbox One. However, anyone can broadcast on the service as long they have a capture device, with the use of a 3rd party app such as XSplit or OBS.
