EPTI'm a 24 year old professional software engineer from germany. I've been creating some famous mods for Diablo 2 and have been in the admin staff for some mayor gaming community websites ( in the ingame.de network. One, if not the biggest gaming network in germany ).
When it comes to StarCraft 2 i'm a total stream-a-holic. I freaking love watching sc2 streams ( my watch stream <-> play sc2 ratio is probably 25:1 or sth :D ). There is barely a day where i don't watch at least 5h of sc2 streams.
Thus http://sc2.fm was born.
Why did you create sc2.fm?
Because when i started getting in touch with sc2 ( first beta key wave ) and Husky/HD kicked of the new age of streaming starcraft ( hate it or not, but they are the pioneers of sc2 "new age" casting ) there was only one practicable way of following the starcraft vod/casters : Having ~40 sites bookmarked, running an Mass-F5 on all of them every 5min ( ZOMG I COULD MISS STH !!!11
) and then click through all of them.One day i thought about myself ... why isn't there a kind of youtube just with the special needs of starcraft nerds in mind. A weekend of google later i found out there is no website like that ( this was 2-3 weeks after the first beta invite wave ).
So i started crafting and build the first prototype of http://sc2.fm
It was first developed just for my personal needs, but soon starcraft nerds around the world seemed to come up with the same need for such an plattform and started finding my site via google. No problem with that at all, but i still had no real needs to "ring the big bell" and spam ads to my site all over twitter/facebook/tl and reddit.
But some month of active development and ~200 "Please make this more public, we want to discuss our stream/caster topics in a central point" eMails later ... its maybe time to go now.
To be clear : I was at no point about creating an "elitist comunity" or "NEEEH I DON'T WANT TO SHARE THIS QQ" here. Its just that i have very very high criteria when it comes to "releasing" a product. And in the early stages, http://sc2.fm simply didn't fit that criteria. ( think its cause of this damn tendency of zeh germanz for perfectionism .. but well >.< )
The site has undergone a lot of mayor changes since my first version. I've changed the theme like 7 times ( ground up new developed ) user interfaces so far. I tried a very graphic heavy style ... no one likes bloated interfaces. I tried using a different default width ( 1300px instead of 960px ) and every one complained about how my website doesn't feel right ( basically because all the web is in 960px ) .. well and so on.
Because i use the site literally every day i tweaked a lot of the ui stuff to fit a starcraft stream nerds needs and i'm actively changing stuff around and implementing things on the fly. I take a close look to the mayors ( youtube and some other video portals ) and also spoke to some professional web/software interface designers on how they present stuff to the user and implemented the ( on my taste ) best of all those ideas onto http://sc2.fm
*Self high 5 off :3*
So what is sc2.fm?
-> An fully automated aggregator of sc2 vods from more than 150 sources ( all over youtube, livestream, ustream, blip.tv and others )
-> You can comment, rate and bookmark all the videos
-> It automatically checks if the channels currently stream online ( if a channel goes online it will take at MAX 10min, before it shows up live on http://sc2.fm .. the streamer itself does not need to set it online manually .. its all fully automated )
-> Thanks to http://sc2ranks.com it shows the race, world rank, division, division rank beneath the streamers. So you know if you are seeing high level zerg/terran/toss play and how your fav. streamer has progressed compared to the last day
-> You have an live preview of the currently live channels. So you won't tune into someone playing WoW, LoL or sth ... if you not intend to do so
-> You can bookmark channels or videos. There are special views that only show the last videos of bookmarked channels or the just your bookmarked videos
-> If you are on the homepage or tuned into a channel, it will show a "currently live" box on the right. That box automatically refreshes every 2 min ( you don't need to reload the page ). So even while watching a channel you will not miss the current live streams. The same is true on the homepage of sc2.fm ... the currently live block will self refresh every 2min .. you won't miss the currently live streams. But you will miss the latest vods. Thats currently not self refreshing. )
-> The site has been technically tuned massively towards performance. It should run smooth even on low internet connections.
What is sc2.fm currently missing?
-> The VODs are currently not tagged by matchup, mainly used unit and so on. Technically its all done, but that has to be done manually. And i'm sorry, but i can't manually tag the 200 new vods we get every day. I would HIGHLY appreciate if some other stream nerds could chip in here and help me with that.
-> The search is a mess. I def. need to rework the search. Its working correctly, but showing multiple entries, its not very intuitive .. well working, but def. not a thing you would show to your stepparents on the first meeting
What is planed on the near future for sc2.fm?
Very soon
-> An ability to "I don't like this caster .. exclude it from the default last24hours view and/or from everywhere"
-> Aggregating the starcraft audio podcasts ( State of the Game and so on )
-> Report video as broken link
Soon
-> A better search
-> An theme special developed for mobile devices. No need to buy an iPhone app .. the site will simply change its layout if you're on a mobile device. That assures that you experience the best stream/vod experience while remaining cross device support ( iPhone, Android, Symbian and so on ) and don't need to install an application for that. Would need some tester for that one.
Soon(tm)
-> own3d.tv support ... the problem is not on my side. own3d simply hasn't an api yet. Until that is fixed ( and i'm in close contact to the owner about that ) .. we need to wait i guess.
What do you want us to do?
Well first .. you don't NEED to do anything, but i would highly appreciate :
-> We def. need an logo designer. So hard .. please i'm a programmer .. we don't know PS :S
-> Am i missing anything that we stream nerds need before making an announcement on the sc2 general / reddit?
-> Do you like the minimalistic design of http://sc2.fm?
-> Feedback about the site :D
The big question marks
I'm pretty unsure about the "social networks" integration of the site.
-> Should we spam the newest vods on an twitter/facebook page?
-> Would you guys appreciate an "eMail me if caster xyz goes online" feature?
-> Do you need an "xyz peps like this on facebook" button?
The last words
If you came to this .. thanks for reading this wall of text. Thanks to TL.net and its community.
Oehm yeah ... curious on how the community will respond to that ^_^
