I recently set up a twitch account, initially it was intended for streaming gameplay footage stuff with friends until I learned that my wifi pretty much made that impossible. Gameplay kept coming out heavily pixellated, choppy frame-rate, etc no matter how I set up OBS. So it is mostly for viewing other people’s streams on there now. But I do know my connection is fine for uploading art streams, and it can keep a stable stream up to 900kbps for art.

However, now I am reconsidering my options, since picarto’s free package for streamers means there’s ads on the stream and that can turn people off. I’m not really in a position to drop $15 a month on subscriptions either. On twitch that does not seem to be the case, but at the same time it is not really considered an art streaming platform. I don’t mind either platform since both tend to be stable enough, though I do seem to be warming up to twitch more due to the increased features and automatic recording, which picarto lacks unless you have a premium pack.

The only thing that’s making me refrain from switching over is that I’ll likely lose the fledgling follower base I managed to scrounge up for picarto so far. It’s only 16 people, but I still find it amazing I managed to get 16 people interested in watching to begin with since art streams don’t tend to be as interesting as game streams. Another thing I’ve considered doing is just hopping from twitch to picarto and back depending on what I’m making or divide into have a weekend stream on twitch and then another weekend stream on picarto the following week, but the benefit for that kind of route escapes me.

I might experiment a bit and have a few twitch streams to dip my toes in streaming art on there, and consider my options from there.

That said, for anyone here who tends to stream or like to watch streaming, what do you think of the predicament? Also between the two platforms, which ones do you prefer, why so?