The future of TV seems to have been a big debate for about a decade now, kicking off as soon as streaming quality became high enough to be at least a reasonable facsimile of broadcast media.

But one massively under-discussed area amongst much of traditional media in the massive growth of games as a passive consumer viewing opportunity. They are becoming the sports of the digital era. (And we’ve talked about the growth of eSports at NEXT before…).

That process has taken another step with one of the major game video streaming sites really upping its streaming quality. Amazon-owned streaming service Twitch is upping its video quality significantly:

Your Twitch streams will soon look finer than ever thanks to our new 1080p/60fps video support.

For starters, we’re no longer limiting our ingest bitrate to 3.5 megabits. We officially recommend 3–6 megabits for most streams, skewing toward the higher end for 1080p broadcasts or faster, more demanding games.

It’s worth bearing in mind that YouTube has allowed 4K streaming since late last year, but given Twitch’s focus on streaming games – which are already hitting your processor pretty hard – it makes sense for them to be a little conservative on the additional overhead they’re hitting the originating device with.

Another step towards eSports having complete parity with the more physical variety…