A bottleneck is a point of congestion where weakness in one part of a workflow ruins the shit for all the goodness everywhere else.
While I have the upload speed to stream 5000+kbps, many viewers can’t handle that.
According to Netflix, none of them can.
I took a look at my Twitch stats page and made a spreadsheet comparing the location and quantity of my viewership since March, 2017.
I then went to the Netflix country data and made the chart above of all the real countries that watch me.
Netflix did not have stats for:
- Ukraine
- Serbia
- Croatia
- Korea
The lowest common denominator was the Phillipines, with a download speed of approximately 2340kpbs.
So that should probably be my target bitrate for streams I want to be fully-inclusive with.
(Incidentally, I do not always want to be that. I sometimes prefer higher bitrates so my youtube videos will look better, for example.)
I have already made a chart with resolution, frame-rate, and acceptable bitrate here.
According to that chart, 720p25 @ a video bitrate of 2304 should be suitable for most viewers.