Indeed there are some serious issues with Twitch in Europe. For about a year streams were crystal clear with no issues. Then they started to mess with stream qualities, I guess they had to do some interesting optimizations in order to deal with increasing userbase. So since this summer I've only been able to watch streams on highest quality a couple of times. Problem with second highest quality is that whenever there's movement in-game, stream looks pixelated, some games look especially bad: [ARMA: DayZ on Twitch High quality] http://imgur.com/a/x2Ahr

Another interesting thing is that even if stream lags on highest quality, I'm still able launch multiple concurrent streams of second highest quality and none of them lag (I launched 5 streams, after which CPU usage maxes out, so I didn't try more). But watching a SINGLE stream on highest quality? Nop, not going to happen, while audio is fine, video stutters every 5-10sec, freezes for 2sec, rinse&repeat.

They definitely have major issues due to the sheer amount of bandwidth they need to utilize. I find their popular stream (or perhaps it's all streams during popular events) watchable (at any resolution, and it's definitely not my Internet connection) around half of the time.

I have seen Twitch representatives essentially blame this on the ISPs/backbones. They say they try to make deals to secure bandwidth across backbones, but they're often just at the mercy of the big guys. The most well-known issue was with Time Warner, which was apparently solved later according to a Twitch blog post.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1exa2k/hi_im_emmett_sh...

http://blog.twitch.tv/2013/06/time-warner-cable-works-with-t...

This isn't necessarily twitch's fault. I know there were issues with AT&T in my area related to twitch and AT&T refused to help alleviate the issue until they got a ton of complaints. It seems similar to the struggles netflix sees with some ISPs