How to Stream Chess on Twitch and Avoid Connection Issues

Are you a fan of chess, either watching or playing it? We've got some good news for you, if you haven't heard it already. Starting 2020, Chess has been blowing up on Twitch, being promoted by stars like Hikaru Nakamura and by the Netflix's The Queen's Gambit miniseries. In mid February 2021, chess.com announced that Chess was the biggest gaming category on Twitch.

Indeed, the classic game of chess has reached new audiences and is very popular. Now is the perfect time to start streaming chess on Twitch - you will be able to ride the wave. You don't have to be a grand master for this; you can just play with your friends or find other users to play with.

There's only one catch: your Internet connection has to be up for that: fast and reliable. In order to gather an audience to watch the chess games you live stream on Twitch, you have to make sure you stream at the best quality your hardware allows you to. You don't want to be bottlenecked by your Internet connection or even worse - encounter connectivity issues and disconnects while streaming.

This article will share the best solution on how to stream chess on Twitch without any Internet connectivity issues. You know - the buffering, the stuttering, the disconnections... there will be no more of those - read below.

Streamergencies (streaming emergencies) happen when your Internet connection is slow and unreliable. Usually it means it can't keep up a steady flow of data towards the Twitch servers. FYI - the recommended Internet upload speeds for live streaming on Twitch in 1080p is around 6 Mbps.

But speed / bandwidth is not everything when live streaming chess on Twitch. You also need your Internet connection to be reliable. And this is something the Indian Chess Team found out on their own in 2020, when they nearly lost a couple of games in the Chess Online Olympiad because of the Internet that kept disconnecting.

So why do these streamergencies happen? To simplify things, it's one of the following:

• The Twitch platform is experiencing issues (not likely)
• Your connection to the Twitch ingest servers is poor
• Your ISP is throttling your Twitch or streaming traffic
• Your Internet plan is too slow to handle it - especially in rural areas.
• Other apps are hogging the Internet bandwidth.
• There is high packet loss. Internet connections are dropping network packets, so your streaming video misses parts of the audio or video.

What can you do about it? How can you minimize Twitch streaming lag / latency and avoid network errors?

First and foremost - in order to eliminate the obvious - check if Twitch is all good on their status page.

Then, you should check out Twitch Inspector. This tool analyzes and assists in the troubleshooting of internet connection or encoder related issues while broadcasting to Twitch. You can also check the Low Latency Video article that Twitch made to fix unstable Twitch streams.

Furthermore, if you're connected through Wi-Fi (wireless) instead of Ethernet (wired), you may want to consider the wired connection. This will greatly improve your internet speed overall, as discussed here.

You can also get an additional connection from a different ISP. This will help you have a backup or a failover in case your main ISP suddenly drops out. And you can also use it together with your main ISP, to increase speed. If you’re wondering how to live stream chess on Twitch and avoid Internet issues, the perfect solution is to use a channel bonding / link aggregation service like Speedify.

Speedify is a connectivity tool and VPN that uses channel bonding technology to allow you to use all of your Internet connections at the same time. Speedify automatically detects Twitch video streams. By watching the flow of packets, Speedify can determine:

• how much bandwidth is needed for you to live stream chess on Twitch, and
• whether or not you're getting the capacity it requires.

Once Speedify has identified the streams, it does several things for them:

1. Maintains Quality of Service (QoS) to make sure they get the connectivity they need versus other services. Speedify prioritizes your chess live stream on Twitch over other types of web traffic. Things like web browsing, backups and software updates won’t mess up your calls and live streams.
2. Bonds connections for faster Internet speed. Speedify can split single video streams across multiple available Internet connections. It can send some packets on Wi-Fi, some on cellular and some on a wired Ethernet connection, if available. Speedify also reassembles these packets so Twitch just sees a faster Internet connection. By moving network packets through all available connections on a computer, smartphone, tablet or other supported device, Speedify can get up to 95% of the speed of the combined connections.
3. Minimizes packet loss using redundancy. If your Internet connections are dropping network packets, then Speedify can detect this. 
   By sending the same data on several connections, and then only delivering whichever copy gets through first, Speedify provides the best reliability of all connections and the lowest latency of any of your connections.
   So, Speedify helps you survive network drop outs, avoid bad latency, and make sure that everything gets through, even in the worst conditions.

Just ask Alessia Santerano, who is one of the most popular chess streamers on Twitch, how Speedify helps her:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Speedify (@speedify)

How to stream chess on Twitch? Use Speedify and forget about any Internet issues! You'll get fast, stable and secure Internet connectivity.