This is correct to some extent. We hit 200+ viewers a few times last season, and never saw the options. However over the past few weeks we have been seeing the options on many of our games, as they have been hitting 250+ viewers.

Transcoding HD streams real-time takes a lot of computing power. Twitch says you only get those options if they have available capacity. From our experience if we consistently hit 100+ viewers we would get the quality options.

Twitch partners have guaranteed trans-coding, I would assume that applies even if you only have 10 viewers.

In addition to the quality options, there are various places twitch will display our channel, possibly including the front page during huge events. It also legitimizes our channel which can increase our following and viewership.

I didn't mention this either, but all of the money we receive from subs / ad revenue will be used to cover our expenses (which basically consists of a monster cat license fairly inexpensive) and then help us organize events, and pay members of the community who contribute to our channel (uberchain / dashner etc). Effectively bringing in more funds to the TF2 community. I'm not interested in lining my own pockets, which is what many people do after gaining twitch partner.

We eSports now!

I am excited to announce that evlTV is now a Twitch partner!

Now you may wonder why that's important to you, especially if you don't tune into our casts. Twitch partner will help us gain a larger amount of viewers to the TF2 comp scene, and bring in a new group of TF2 competitors. This ultimately to add more evidence to valve that we are a real eSport and deserve their support!

I want to thank all of our casters, production staff, Mr Slin, eXtv, fans, and UGC/ESEA teams for their tremendous support in helping us achieve this goal!

Thanks to everyone who watched the match! We were surprised with Twitch Partnership during the game :)

Your puns are bad and you should feel bad.
Please help me discourage dreamboat from using cringe worthy puns on stream, tell him they're bad.

We have dashner doing our HL casts now, and if he has cheat feed working (last week we had some issues with our cheat feed server) he focuses generally on frags, prioritizing back stabs / drops / headshots etc. Cheat feed usually shows those in a darker color.

Watching scout on midfights is a good suggestion, as that's something that usually isn't done.

Not quite sure how that's relevant to this thread?

We're short on production staff, and we need to focus on getting twitch partner. Splitting up our audience to two channels is counter-productive to that goal.

I recently upgraded from an older i5 2500k (oc'd to 4.2ghz) to an i7 4770k (3.9ghz). For both builds I had the same 7870 XT GPU, and didn't notice much any difference in my FPS between the two CPU's, and I kept the settings all at "High". I didn't upgrade for TF2, I upgraded because I multi-task, and wanted a speed bump in render time on After Effects / Premiere.

Unless there is another game, or another reason to go for an i7 the i5 will do just fine.

We'll be covering the SS v Buffalo match, update your bets accordingly folks!

We'd really love to see a Ginyu vs KND match. However, we likely will cover the SS v Buffalo match.

We'll be using primarily EVL resources, but will have some eXtv branding as well.

Fixed, thank you good sir!

We will still continue to cover ESEA-O / ESEA-IM and will be starting UGC Gold coverage in a couple weeks.

The hope is this platinum coverage will grow our audience and potentially bring more viewers (and not just comp players) to our lower division coverage, which we are not changing.

For our platinum coverage it will be Sigafoo and Grizz.