I have some litle ideas for software that could probably make the progamer's lives and more generally streaming easier.
Sadly I'm not really a programmer (just know some basic Ruby / Rails) and can't really realize those ideas.
(Not realising ideas is probably the story of my life ! ><' )
Those are not revolutionary ideas, but still I think that implementing some of them would teally help.
I'm just throwing them out there, so if a programmer has time to realize some of them it would be great for the community.
1) - Music Announcer
What ? : "Add-on" for twitch.tv that, when a user writes a command like /music in the chat would announces the title and the band name of the song that the streamer listens to.
Why ? : - This would prevent people spamming chat channels to find the title of a song.
I know that some viewers already do this but it's manual.
How ? : - You can probably extract the title of the song and the name of the band by parsing the HTML of the music site (Youtube, Grooveshark, Pandora, Spoitfy,...etc)
2) - Opponent Announcer
What ? : - Same idea as above but for announcing opponents.
How ? : - The only way I see in wich you could achieve this is by using a battle.net API (wich doesn't exists I think), parsing battle.net HTML or using a character recognition on the scrren (probably the worst choice).
3) - Progamer Framework
What ? : - "Framework" for programers that helps them oganising the events they are participating at (event calendar), helps them track their earnings ( $/month, $/year) and help them use social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit & co) in a centralized place.
Why ? : - With the rise in popularity of Starcraft II, there are more and more events and tournaments in a lot of differents places and a centralized calendar announcing future events (also the one the gamer is not participating at) and also the status of the progamer for those tournaments (Do I have to qualify ? Where to qualify and when ? What's the prize money ? Tournament format ...etc).
Nowadays progammers have multiple ways of making money like coaching, streaming, addvertising (not stream adds) and tournaments (I probably forgot some). So again, a framework helping them track their earnings could be useful and probably save them time.
Same for the social networks.
How ? : - Since this piece of software is more complicated then the others, this could be probably achieved by using the different API's of the sites and information feeds (like XML RSS) from 3rd party sites or so.
I hope that you like the "ideas" ! =)
--LunaSea
Edit : I will probably do this more often if people like it.