Microsoft aims to offer better quality and latency than Amazon’s market leader.

In the world of video game streaming, Amazon-owned Twitch is still the 800lb gorilla. But that world is wide open for disruption by those with the right technology. Google launched YouTube Gaming last year, and Microsoft's Beam has just been given a substantial upgrade.

Microsoft bought startup Beam earlier this year and announced plans to integrate it into the Xbox One and Windows 10 as part of the Creators Update that's due in spring 2017.

YouTube Gaming's major strengths over Twitch are its strong support for archiving—many Twitch streamers already depend on YouTube for saving historic videos—and its much better playback experience. With YouTube, you can pause and rewind live streams for up to four hours. This enables convenient as-live viewing of tournaments, even accounting for bathroom breaks or weird time zones. Beam's angle is its interactivity: the stream has a latency of around 200 milliseconds on average, enabling streamers to interact with viewers in a way that's awkward at best on Twitch, with its multi-second delays. To enhance this interactivity, Beam has various gamification options that allow viewers to interact, not just with the streamer, but with the game they're playing (spawning enemies, making volcanoes erupt, or whatever else a game developer might choose to integrate).

The latest update is a substantial quality improvement: Beam now supports data rates up to 10 Mb/s and resolutions up to 2560×1440 at 60 frames per second. The service also now has scheduling features and the ability to create events that are broadcast by multiple streamers. Beam will also switch to a pure HTML5 interface. And it has a new logo, too.

As the service moves under the Microsoft umbrella, its login system is also changing to use Xbox Live authentication.

The upgraded capabilities are available now to Beam Pro users. They will roll out to everyone in 2017.

Microsoft's plans for close integration into Xbox One and Windows are likely to stimulate adoption of Beam, but it still trails far, far behind Twitch, which boasts just shy of 10 million daily active users. In spite of some technical shortcomings, Twitch's relative longevity gives it a huge head start. So too does its staff; they work closely with high-profile gaming tournaments, and we've heard they provide invaluable support and assistance.

Other streaming services have tried to win users over through sponsoring tournaments that are then streamed exclusively through their services. They've also offered lucrative contracts to high-profile streamers. If Microsoft is serious about Beam's adoption, the technical merits and close platform integration are unlikely to be sufficient on their own; sponsorship and technical expertise are essential, too.