If you play on PC, you probably stumbled on Raptr at least once. If not, it's a service that allows you to optimize your PC games performance and that allows you to collect points by playing games to later use them to redeem various rewards. The free client also has a community hub, where players can share their screenshots, talk about the game or post replays. Raptr decided to expand this last feature and actually make a separate service for it with many possibly interesting features. The new service is called Plays.tv and aims to allow players to easily capture and share their "Pro" moments.
Raptr introduced the gameplay recording feature on their client 9 months ago and, since then, 4 million videos got uploaded using the service. Plays.tv is supposed to be an evolution of that feature. They describe it as an "Instagram-like" service. It records your play sessions and allows you to edit your videos and then automatically upload and share it on Youtube or any social network you want.
What is the gain of that in a world overwhelmed by video recording softwares? According to Raptr, the main advantage of Plays.tv will be performance. They promise that the client will have virtually no impact whatsoever on the performance of the game. They accomplish that by using hardware-accelerated video encoding, hyper-optimized software encoding and advanced video compression.
The client is designed to be as intuitive and effortless to use as possible. It starts recording the moment you start a game (so you don't have to remembe it) and saves the footage on your hard drive. You can configure the client to optimize space usage, telling it how and when start overwriting old videos to make room for new ones. Should something awesome happen while you play, you can click a hotkey that brings up an overlay with the last 20 minutes of recorded footage. You can edit it on the fly trimming the desired highlight and share it right away with just a couple more clicks.
In the era of live streamers and youtubers, the people of Raptr could be onto something. Especially considering that one of the issuses that gaming video content creators bring up the most, is the need of many different softwares to record, edit and optimize video footage even when you only want to show those 25 seconds where you managed to do a pentakill on LoL.
The only thing to do is jump on the plays.tv website, download the free client and give it a try.
What you think of this new service? Will you give it a shot? Let us know in the comments.
