A good streaming experience is a combination of many factors including video quality, audio-video synchronization, consistent frame rate and responsiveness. We’re working on all of these factors, but today we’d like to focus on responsiveness.

Responsiveness is one of the most important factors for many players. Games are real-time experiences and often reward players with how quickly or how precisely they can respond to game events. In order for a streaming experience to be a good one, the game needs to react quickly to user input. How quickly depends on the game and the player, but in general the shorter the delay, the better the experience.

Responsiveness can be measured as the total round trip delay, or latency, between an action (pressing the fire button on a game controller) and seeing the result of that action (gun firing on the screen). Some latency we don't have any control over, such as latency in third-party wireless controllers or the performance of home wireless routers. Other types of latency can be adjusted, such as switching your TV into a gaming mode or changing the streaming bandwidth settings within Steam.

Network latency can be significantly impacted by the amount of video data streamed between machines. A good streaming experience requires minimizing the amount of data being processed while trying to keep the highest possible image quality. We’re working on ways to dynamically adapt to network conditions but sometimes the best way to improve your streaming experience is simply to reduce your game’s video resolution or reduce the number of frames per second (FPS) used in the stream.

<a href="http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream#announcements/detail/1496614934736756460">Continue to Part 3, Home Networks</a>