Streaming On The 8th October

With the patch coming out on Tuesday, I'll be doing an all day stream (aiming for 8 hours minimum) to try out the new patch. During this, I'll be running open squads for people who want to fight for the Minmitar during the next event, so feel free to join in.

You can find my stream over on twitch. I'll likely start shortly after downtime ends.

Moving Is Finished, Time To Work

Moving is done for the moment. Might need to take a couple days to sort things now and again, but I've likely got the rest of the year to work on current projects with little interruption. I've spent this morning clearing out my secondary hard-drive and getting my computer to a happier state. Before the end of today, I'll be able to record, edit, upload and stream anything I want to. So here's an overview of what I'll be doing the next couple of months.

Blogging

Most recently I've been doing a lot of meta blogging and haven't produced as much actual content as I would like. I'll be writing more now and it will contain content that I'll have spent more time on. This will also include more EVE Online content, as I will be playing more EVE. I'll be looking into doing more high quality Dust posts over the coming months too, likely including guides and some more opinion pieces. There's some cool stuff in store for when the orbital changes come too (hopefully in 1.5).

Boots On The Ground

I'll be recording weekly again and with my new upload speeds, should result in quicker delivery and overall higher quality. Interest in the show has dropped a bit, but I'm still committed to making it. If anyone wishes to be a guest on the show, details are in the blog on the sidebar.

CPM Live

With the success of the CPM Ask Me Anything that took place over a month ago, I've been wanting to push to do a live weekly show with the CPM members that are interested. According to Hans' latest blog, the development schedule requires a level of compressed feedback that the show should help facilitate. Format will likely be an hour long and involve answering questions posted in the Youtube comments system. I will play a pure moderator role and mostly just filter questions coming in. Time and day is still to be set, a blog will be posted when they are.

General Youtube

I've mostly just been putting low effort videos onto Youtube recently and it shows. The best videos I've made recently can't be shown to the public yet and I haven't had time for better content. After some feedback from various places, raw gameplay videos will probably stop after the Logi Bro games are up. I will be taking more time to actually edit and produce more enjoyable content. I will also be streaming EVE and Dust on the channel too, so those will be archived and used for videos.

In the end, I'll probably monetize streaming, guides and talk shows, with tournament stuff later on. This means my other videos will have no restrictions on things like music, so I can make some videos for the sake of making cool stuff.

The 4 Minute Update

This project came to a grinding halt when we realized it's problems early on. It's been in limbo until new artwork and a real intro can be made. The older interviews will likely need redone or require a rework. This is frustrating since people took the time to talk to us back in July, but hopefully we can work things out. Artwork is almost done now, so it'll be back shortly after that has been finalized.

Other Projects

In about 2 weeks, I'll disappear for a couple days to do some personal stuff and work on something with a couple real life friends. This is something outside of gaming, so I'll only mention it in the future when it impacts other stuff I'm working on.

Anyway, time to go get some of this done.

I Guess This Is Where Youtube Wins

So after a number of announcements recently, it seems Google are finally starting to put more serious effort in competing in small scale live broadcasting. For a long time, I had no real idea how anyone actually got to the point where they could live broadcast on Youtube (other than being really big). They've finally set the bar at 100 subscribers though. As someone with 411 Youtube subs and 36 Twitch followers, you can probably see where this blog post is going.

If you've paid much attention to live video streaming on the internet recently, you'll have noticed the huge growth that industry has seen. Twitch.tv came from a simple 'Justin.tv does games' and turned into a large live streaming haven for gamers. Outside of gaming, you have websites like livestream.com and ustream.tv continue to exist as well. It's been a good couple years for live streaming and we're about to go into one of the biggest weekends for broadcasted gaming content in history.

So where was Youtube until now? Surely with such a, dare I say "booming industry", they could have been a large contender already. From what I've seen though, it's a matter of scale. Twitch might have a 200,000 or so people watching on a good day, but that's a drop in the bucket for Youtube. When I see something being streamed on Youtube, it's a Wimbledon or a guy jumping out of a large metal can from about 39km into the stratosphere. When you have millions watching a guy screaming while playing Happy Wheels, would you really care about a handful of people with mere thousands watching him live?

It seems Youtube did the smart move here; wait for live streaming to grow and focus on large scale events while building better tools and infrastructure. Twitch has become unstable recently, even to the point where 240p can lag. By comparison, watching Wimbledon on Youtube was a pleasure. The stream would auto adjust it's resolution when left on default and I could manually change it with a seamless transition. If there was lag, I don't remember it and the lack of thousands of people spamming chat icons wasn't missed.

I don't know what the catalyst for Youtube suddenly going after the smaller broadcasters is, but they seem in a good position to do it. Twitch might have some shinier features, but Youtube is stronger in a number of ways. The Twitch highlight and export system is a real headache when you're dealing with multiple accounts. Youtube has a superior interface with more options and gives you the ability to download the entire thing as a video file to edit yourself. Even the simple things like a centralized point of people seeing all of my content is a huge boon. Not to say Youtube is perfect, but if people can watch my content in high quality without issue, then there's only one real choice.

Depending on how things work out on the monetization side of things (such as the ability to run adverts), I see no reason to use Twitch when I plan to start streaming next month. I don't plan on putting any sponsor logos up when I stream, so Youtube's policy on that doesn't bother me. I also don't like the idea of going through the uncertainty of getting a Twitch partnership if my existing Youtube partnership does the same job. Why spend time building up something I could potentially make money from when I already have a more established platform?

Quick Update About Content In August

Been a bit quiet recently around these parts, figured I'd give some details into the near future.

Boots On The Ground

The next BOTG with be recorded on the weekend of the 10th August and will be the only episode until September. This is mostly an issue of free time, as it takes a large amount of time to actually organize the show. Once I've moved in September, I'll be able to dedicate myself more to the show. Doing even 1 show in August is a big deal on my schedule, but I don't want to leave people hanging for too long.

Other Video Content

There's another video on my channel right now that is currently unlisted until I get the go ahead from CCP that they've fixed the exploit it covers. It has the potential to break the game more so than anything else I've seen this year, so I'm not even going into details on that.

Other videos I'll upload in August include the tournament matches I'll be playing in for GIANT. Outside of those however, I won't really be doing much as far as my main channel is concerned.

There were some hiccups with another video project I've been working on, so that will be taking a lot of what little time I have outside packing and Dust.

Blogs

When the exploit video goes up, I'll be doing my review of the Mordu event as well. There's a 1.3 review that will happen at some point and I might do something along the lines of thoughts on the Plasma Cannon.

I'll also be doing a blog on the format I want to use for Dust competition in the future when Gladiator features come in. It's something I'll be focusing on a lot in the future (2014), so I'll be looking into feedback on that.

I'll also do some feedback on the Prime Cup or whatever it's called.

September Live Streams

Once I've moved, I'll be able to stream Dust. Given that, I'm planning on a few weekly shows that will be recorded live.

The first will be a show featuring a guest CPM member to hang out and answer questions. We'll be playing some casual games while we do this (maybe Flash Duel) to fill time between questions. Currently Kane has confirmed that he would like to do this, so it will definitely be happening. Not sure if other CPM members would be interested.

The second will be a weekly show going into specific parts of Dust for around 30 minutes before doing another 30 of Q&A. Topics might include specific weapons, dropsuit layouts, reviewing old matches, talking to veteran players and more. This is aimed at giving players some direction

I'll be doing some general streaming outside of those too, but my main focus for Dust content at first will be putting out those 2 pieces of content and Boots On The Ground while working on a single side project.

What I Want To Spectate And Broadcast Dust Matches

I was originally planning on writing about the Mordu event today. But I found a massive exploit during the event that could completely break Dust and am in the process of gathering more information on it so I can get in touch with CCP.

I missed the CPM AMA while playing around with it today (as well as real life stuff), so I don't know much about what was discussed there. DS10 wrote out the first hour or so, so going off the "we take feedback given through the CPM", I'm making some requests for when they build this feature.

This is what I want as far as broadcasting tools for Dust's "Gladiator" matches.

• 1 team to appear red and 1 appear blue with a corresponding name plate at the top.
• Default camera pitch at 55 degrees.
• Default camera distance at 30 meters off the ground.
• Left control stick to move the camera on the X and Y axis.
• Right control stick to change the camera's pitch.
• R2 and L2 to change the camera's yaw.
• Square to toggle player stats such as K/D/A/hacks/defends.
• Circle to change camera back to default.
• Triangle to toggle armour/shield/stamina bars above players and ammo for current weapon to the right of players, for example player has 64/80.
• Holding X and pressing a d-pad button to save a camera location.
• Pressing a d-pad button to skip to a saved camera location.
• R1 and L1 to skip between (living) player points of view. Other possible ways to do this with these buttons.
• Edit: Forgot to add a way to shift the Z axis. Maybe use R1 and L1 while holding x for this?

This is just some ideas, but I hope they find them useful. Broadcasting has become a key part to any competitive title and as someone who's interested in being involved with this in the future, I really want CCP to get this right.