While 4K isn’t necessarily *new* technology, it’s recently coming out to consumers and now to gamers via hitbox.

Let’s get the elephant out of the room. Hitbox is one of the main competitors to Twitch. But something Twitch has yet to achieve is a 4K 60fps streaming option.

Hitbox announced they would start providing 4K quality options to their streamers and to display how it would look they held the first ever esports event streamed entirely in 4K on December 6th.

The 4K Heroes Showmatch featured 4 of the top Heroes of the Storm teams in the world, Team Liquid, TCM Gaming, G2, & Fnatic, with a $4,000 prize pool (catching onto the theme yet?). While some in the Heroes community questioned the quality of the teams chosen for the tournament, the entertainment provided not only from the matches but from the quality from the stream was top notch.

No esport event (new or seasoned) is immune to technical difficulties; however hitbox only had some minor sound issues and a couple of freezes throughout the event. Even if you weren’t watching on a 4K monitor you probably noticed some slight quality differences. The picture was crisper even scaled down to 1080p.

I got the chance to chat with hitbox CEO Martin Klimscha and gauge his thoughts on the success of the 4K Heroes Showmatch and the future of hitbox & esports.


First of all, from your perspective, how do you feel like it went?

It went great! HotS looked gorgeous, and the teams gave us great competitive action! At this level of quality, fans were able to see much more of the action in crystal clear detail, and feel even closer to the action.
We were excited to have some of the best teams compete. We think this is the future of live streaming and this was a very successful proof of concept showcasing our efforts.

How difficult it was setting up an event of this magnitude with new 4K technology?
We had been working on the backend and server infrastructure to support livestreaming at 4K 60 frames per second since this past summer and began putting this “4KHeroes” tournament together in October. We're pushing live streaming to new limits and it required implementing new technologies and a ton of testing to get it right. The process challenged our entire team, but the result was exciting and we’re satisfied we are now offering the highest quality of service to esports fans. I want to give a shoutout to our tech team that made this all happen, they did an amazing job. Really happy to work with these guys. Can’t forget our marketing team either, it was team effort.

What type of response did you get from the Heroes community?

The response was fantastic and the crowd grew throughout the evening. Thousands of viewers tuned in and many were following the results on twitter. The 4K Heroes chat window was filled with great comments about our approach to set the bar on stream quality, and we also got the opportunity to answer a lot of questions about 4K.

How would you compare the magnitude of the 4K Showmatch to the European Championship that was held in May?

We love the game we’re happy a lot of other people like it and that the whole Heroes of the Storm community is growing very strongly, that’s something very positive. We wanted to be part of that, we wanted to create tournaments. The tournament in May was a bit of a test to see how Heroes of the storm was working. The 4K tournament was of course something different.

The main difference was that in May our esports guys and our community guys were involved and now our tech teams are more involved because we wanted to put on a great tournament with a great group of teams. It was something we did to show our tech and to test our tech.

After 4k going off so smoothly what do you see in the future for hitbox and not only Heroes of the Storm but esports in general? What would you like to see be pushed for the future?

We want to set the bar on quality level from a lot of different angles. We didn’t really invest a lot of money in esports originally. We kept it on our service, we started doing tournaments with Counter Strike and League of Legends and now with Heroes of the Storm and we’ll definitely be doing more tournaments with viewers because we simply like the game. We’re absolutely sure that this is going to be bringing in more to participate for next year. We want to be an open platform. We love gaming and that does not only consist of esports but also a lot of casual games and living room streamers. We want to add more teams to the tournaments, and add more top streamers to our platform.

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