This is similar to my previous blog about people complaining about the camera man not showing enough stuff, and how they nitpick minor details yada yada. Today I'm going to talk about the quality of videos, here and now fans want the best quality picture they can get. If it's not HD or near HD they tend to just say well EFF this and move on, but let me take you back on a ride...
Way back in 2003 or 2004, vods were a rarity and much coveted things the most often we got news posts like these and Manifesto7 was a great man at writing them I appreciated and loved them because it was so difficult to track down VODs for events. But even then once they became more readily available or put onto youtube they were frequently so blurry or pixelated you could barely see the units but since that was all we had we dealt with it. The games were epic it was worth going through whatever to see or hear about them. Sometimes the battle reports came several days later when we already knew the results but we'd sit down with a snack and read on...
Quality like this was good for back then
Watching games live was unheard of at this point still you still hoped that a vod would be posted not too much later after the fact. Move on a few years and streams are a little more common but the quality is terrible, worse than the VODs which have improved at this point, but still to get to watch live we put up with it. They were unreliable and crashed frequently, to even see the list of streams on teamliquid for quite a while you needed a firefox addon which added a small "Streams" tab down near the Power Rank. This was buggy and didn't always work.
Now jump forward to today when 3-5 streams online at any given time on teamliquid on a slow night. There are super high quality streams available on youtube and livestream, but ustream has lag issues and livestream tends to crash. If you drop your stream quality to fix this people complain, if your stream lags people complain, if your stream drops people complain.
We have gone from days when people would sit for half an hour waiting for a stream to even start so they could watch the intros; to now if day[9] takes a 5 minute break on a big tournament he loses a thousand viewers. I'm sure this is nothing new but it annoys me that people will complain complain complain endlessly nothing is good enough, it always has to be better try thinking back what starcraft fans had to deal with to even see anything not even 3 years ago let along going back 7 or 8.
Stepping off my high horse in... three... two... one...
As much as I fully agree with you, because I myself was a broodwar player. I stayed up all night watching streams like gomtv, OSL,MSL in terrible quality from years ago but things change. With technological advancements the bar under which we see fit raises.
If anyone also remembers... back in the 90's we used to wait 5 minutes for a single web-page to load, this is not acceptable by any means anymore though. We ALL want instant gratification of a higher quality. As time goes on, this will only get worse rael, I'm sorry but thats just how things change over time.
I think the complaining is a good thing. It might not seem so at the time, but when the fans aren't happy the broadcasters will continue to strive to do better. And when one guy figures out how to squeeze that little extra quality out of 2MB/s then everyone else will hussle to keep up.
From a fan's point of view, constructive criticism forces the hand of broadcasters. The exodus of top shows from Livestream to Ustream is a direct consequence of this. With Ustream it seems like there is more freedom in terms of controlling a show's production. Especially if you buy the Producer Pro. As more shows leave livestream, they will have to start working on their servers and bandwidth for free shows. (paid livestream doesn't seem to have any issues) and the cycle continues.
Now of course, complaining over and over again during the show is just trolling and deserves a ban That's no way to support the service.. but some kids don't get it.
No, we're not spoiled. The technology has advanced a lot since 2001 and it's pretty ridiculous how some people think 320*240 with 300 kbit/s bitrate is watchable quality halfway into 2010.
The problem is it's expensive to keep up with technology and also time consuming to know how to do everything properly. People will always complain, yes, but complaining is how we get things to IMPROVE.
You're wrong again, just like your mech ZvT thread.
On June 03 2010 20:39 ghen wrote: I think the complaining is a good thing. It might not seem so at the time, but when the fans aren't happy the broadcasters will continue to strive to do better. And when one guy figures out how to squeeze that little extra quality out of 2MB/s then everyone else will hussle to keep up.
From a fan's point of view, constructive criticism forces the hand of broadcasters. The exodus of top shows from Livestream to Ustream is a direct consequence of this. With Ustream it seems like there is more freedom in terms of controlling a show's production. Especially if you buy the Producer Pro. As more shows leave livestream, they will have to start working on their servers and bandwidth for free shows. (paid livestream doesn't seem to have any issues) and the cycle continues.
Now of course, complaining over and over again during the show is just trolling and deserves a ban That's no way to support the service.. but some kids don't get it.
Let me tell you first hand producer pro sucks.. horribly. We were considering staying on livestream and were even working out a deal where they would sponsor us in return for not having to pay for the premium stream until the point where they said they can't say the lag and the stream crashing would go away. THe conception that paid livestream doesn't have issues is rather false as they even went as far as to say Day9's stream crashed because and I quote "He had too many viewers" and saying that in fact their premium servers don't run on different servers than their free ones. Ustream means that you either have to go pro and deal with many many software issues and annoying features or have to deal with hardware workarounds to get your sound to work correctly. FMLE can work but is a royal pain in the arse and doesn't provide as consistant performance
With ustream many people who were able to stream on livestream because the procaster was such a nice all in one tool find out they can't cast on ustream because their sound card is sub par we've already lost 2-3 casters from our lineup because of this. So basically anyone wishing to stream is forced into picking... do we go to ustream where we won't crash everything is an uphill battle to get running at any decent quality (pay even more to run in HD on top of going pro) with many many hours offline of fine tuning for every cast and it lags randomly. Or do we stay with livestream where the quality is good it's easy to set up and run but it will crash consistantly to the point where sometimes the viewers will see 20% of any given game.
Yes there are some people with the magical setup of internet + computer who can provide amazing quality streams on ustream which are flawless and never crash but keep in mind most people don't get paid to stream and are limited heavily by their upload speed as many ISP try to limit the upload potential of a given user to prevent pirating. Personally my computer can handle streaming in ultra settings on maxe screen resolution but aforementioned ISP has limited my upload to almost unusable settings even after paying to upgrade it and refuses to fix the limited connectivity constantly denying that I have a problem at all.
Yes fans wanting more can be good to a point but when literally what they want is nearly impossible without paying extravagant amounts of money to an ISP for a custom business connection for a service you don't get paid for then it gets a little pesky.
However, I don't think that it "used to be worse" is a valid point to keep people from complaining. Without increasing demand, there is no incentive for the market to improve further, and as you mentioned, the services provided are far from perfect. I think the ability to be spoiled with a choice of streams not only directly makes it easier to find something you like, but forces the streamers to be good to get viewers.
In any case, an increasing amount of streams and streamers speaks volumes of where the foreign SC community has gotten, and the potential of growth in this great environment.
We're not spoiled, it's technology that improves. You cannot compare today with 7-8 years ago. It's like saying "Starcraft 2 gamers are spoiled! Back then we had only 256mb ram, 15" CRT, ball mouse, 640x480!" Well, technology will always be improving.
Live online stream was like totally new back then, and it obviously had many flaws. Technology improves, and with improvements, people change, and, no matter what, people will always want things to be better and faster. As technology becomes more affordable, more reliable and faster, people become more impatient. We're not spoiled, technology has changed, and we changed with it. That's all.
It does annoy me that people always come into the iCCup TV Chat and say things like "It's slightly bad here" or "The screen ration is off" or "the caster's mics aren't balanced" (WHich is good because who wants to hear Joseki talk anyways??!?). I can't imagine how much it annoys you, the actual streamer though. Think its okay for people to want certain things in a stream, but they need to be more considerate and patient when a stream is having issues.
EPT
That's no way to support the service.. but some kids don't get it.
