After moving to Korea (again) last summer I noticed a big decline in broodwar related news, streams and general content on TL. I’m not a big broodwar fan myself (or at least I wasn’t back then), but in my mind Team Liquid will always be a community founded on broodwar. Because of this I started restreaming afreeca around mid-september. For the first 2-3 weeks I was mostly doing it for fun, but one day I decided to take it to the next level. Until that day I had been the only one controlling my two streams with the setup shown here:
This setup was used from 21st of September to the 7th of October for a total of 210 broadcast hours on snipealot2(laptop back then), in other words more than 50% uptime through me alone controlling the stream for over 12 hours per day. I was between semesters and had a ton of free time, but even though it was fun watching broodwar it started to feel like a chore. At the same time I was bombarded with complaints regarding who was shown, sound issues, the quality of the stream etc. If it wasn’t for my awesome chat moderators back then I probably would’ve shut the whole thing down. This graph shows the uptime of snipealot2 from September:
Luckily my original post received a ton of praise and support from the community, though not as many moderator applications as I wanted. Even now, 4 months in, I haven’t had the opportunity to turn down a moderator application. Everyone who has ever applied properly has been accepted. Most of them were known regulars in the stream chat already though. The constant supervision (changing streamers, restarting the stream when it crashes, and fixing general issues) requires the team behind the stream to be huge. With the help of new blood and very active moderators though we managed the following uptime for October (The remote desktop solution came online on the 7th):
As you can see we did have a few bumps in the road along the way, but we still managed a massive 641 out of 744 possible hours for October. In other words an uptime of 86.1%. The total viewer hours for this month ended at a staggering 78197. To put this in perspective, if the stream was listed on the SC2 player stream rankings, it would have been number 11, just over Liquid’Hero for this first month.
At the same time I realized that although what we were doing wasn’t technically illegal, it was certainly immoral in some ways. Most of the streamers on afreeca do this as their main job, and while their income doesn’t come from commercials they certainly do benefit from having more viewers. The donation system on afreeca is what gives them money to eat and live, having more people donate is imperative for the constant content they produce. Still, getting registered on afreeca is one thing, being able to donate is completely different. While getting ‘approved’ for chatting on afreeca only requires a scanned passport, actually donating money(star balloons) requires a payment method(cellphone, credit card, bank transfer, t-money card) tied to a Korean SSN. Anyone with this handy would certainly already be watching on afreeca. I applied for twitch partnership but was swiftly denied on the basis that my viewership was low (even though the viewer hours rivaled that of the popular sc2 streamers). Still, I was determined to figure out a way for the foreign stream to contribute. Even though I sent emails (in Korean) to players asking them to open paypal accounts, nobody could apparently figure out how to actually create an account because paypal doesn’t have a Korean webpage.
Moving on to November I decided the only course of action was to improve the numbers on the stream and attain partnership. Something I must say we managed to do; we even managed to broadcast for a record 25 hours on the 4th of November, a record we have yet to beat.
November was certainly an improvement compared to October, but I was running into some issues keeping the laptop functional. Most of the downtimes we had was me running fixes and optimizing the computer, also figured out a pretty silly bug with Obsproject – apparently if don’t run it as administrator it will desync your sound after a couple of days streaming. Even with the downtimes we had the uptime for November ended up at 99.3% - pretty good if you ask me. The total viewer hours for November showed a pretty decent 12% increase from October, bringing the total up to 88682. Compared to the SC2 streamers this would place the stream at rank6.
Towards the end of November SSL was getting into the final rounds, numbers on the stream were up but until then I had either been starting the SSL restreams myself or set things up perfectly for moderators to do it in 4 easy steps through remote desktop. I was planning on going to the finals in person though which meant I would not be home to control things properly. As the final stream would be at a different time with a different setup I couldn’t really prepare the streams like I used to do for the other rounds. Thus, the restreaming of the finals was in many ways a disaster – I apologize for this.
After the SSL Finals on the 1st of December I was facing a new problem though. I had tickets to go home to Norway for Christmas, but keeping a laptop running in my apartment while I was gone for over 2 weeks was not an option. I had already been having issues with overheating, and while it was mostly a long standing joke, I did fear it might burn down the apartment one day. The solution was crude but simple as it turned out my enclosed balcony has a power outlet. Putting the laptop on the balcony would mean using wifi but it did feel a lot safer having it out there. Another bonus was of course eliminating the overheating issue as it the outside temperature was -15C. We still had a couple of bumps in December though as you can see:
The early downtime in December was me preparing the laptop for my absence, mainly making sure everything was updated and relocating it to the balcony. The other downtime you see is what happens when you let your girlfriend borrow your apartment for a Christmas Eve dinner with friends. Her unplugging the wifi router as she left on the 25th turned into a 12 hour downtime, but she was kind enough to stop by before work the next day plugging it in again. Even though the uptime for December was lower (97.3%) compared to November, we saw a crazy increase in viewer hours due to one player alone. The average viewer hours jumped from 3000 hours per day to over 4000 hours per day (and stayed that way) mid-december when Liquid’Sea quit SC2 in order to stream broodwar on afreeca. Another crazy jump happened when Sea played his first Sonic Ranking Tournament (SRT11) on the 27th, setting a new record at 641 concurrent viewers. Although the following days didn’t bring in as many viewers, we saw a clear spike in viewers whenever he was on stream. I’m sure the fact that Sea utterly dominated his first SRT made a ton of people get a taste for broodwar. December saw 39.3% growth compared to November, bringing the viewer hours to 123490. Again comparing the stream to the SC2 streamers on TL, the stream would rank 5th for this month.
This is where the laptop was when I was in Norway: + Show Spoiler +
Coming back from Norway I brought with me some computer parts with the intention of setting up a proper streaming computer. The old laptop (now used for the snipealot3 sonic restream) still hasn’t really recovered from running at 90%+ CPU load for 3 months straight. I ordered a few missing computer parts I didn’t bring with me because of weight issues and received them all by January 3rd. Then I set up the computer and tested the setup thoroughly on a separate twitch channel before replacing the laptop on snipealot2. Even at the same bitrate I’m sure everyone (at least I did) noticed a big jump in quality due to the sheer processing power of the new computer. I later put up a chip-in to cover the cost of the computer parts (45$) which was covered in just a few days by some awesome supporters.
At the same time the twitch partnership got accepted, meaning we could finally start supporting the players somewhat. It was clear early on that the amount of money would never be a lot (early estimated pointed towards around 300$ for January) but at least it was something. I informed Sonic on the 21st of January of this and he seemed genuinely happy. I still wish we could get paypal ids for all the players though as I’m pretty sure a lot of people would love to donate presents to their favorite players for their efforts.
Overall January was a pretty awesome month, even if we did have some uptime issues when inactive moderators coincided with the start of my semester. Luckily a plea to the broodwar community produced a few active moderators to fill the gap. We’re still struggling some days but January marks the month with the highest uptime yet, 741 hours out of 744 total (99.6% uptime).
Just like all the preceding months, January also showed a pretty good boost in viewer hours. A growth of 31.9% put the total viewer hours at 162937. It will be interesting to see the numbers compared to other streamers for January when those numbers are compiled. For now we can look at the graph for the past 4 months detailing both viewer hours and total video plays(views) on snipealot2 – it has been a pretty fun ride.
As today is the first day of February it’s going to be interesting to see if the stream can maintain the growth it has had so far. With own3d going bankrupt and afreeca currently developing an English client to move into the international market this stream might be obsolete in a few months, but until then both I and the whole moderator team will do our best to keep the stream running. That said, if anyone is interested in contributing – do not hesitate to send me a pm here on team liquid. It is only through the incredible efforts of all the moderators that we have been able to keep the stream on for the past 4 months, they are all true heroes:
I rarely watch your stream, but that means very little concerning how awesome what you have done is. It isn't the game I grew up with, but for a lot of people on this site, you've resurrected BW streams for them. You are amazing Snipe.
Thanks for everything snipealot really appreciate the work you have done here bringing us 24/7 bw live action to the viewers. Just want to say that I am totally in debt to you for doing this .
Sometimes I watch the stream when going to bed and I fall asleep with the stream running but muted. Then sometimes there is that strange bug I suppose on twitch where during a commercial the stream audio comes back on but the commercial's audio is still muted. This happened once when Sky or Mong was raging and screaming in his mic and I woke up thinking my house was on fire or something
I feel obliged to point out that I have never actually changed a stream or done anything of the sort. I have just made made some highlights and put them on Youtube, and played some advertisements in between games.
Wow, I knew there was a certain amount of effort on your part to keep the stream running, but I had no idea. And you were actually sinking money (computer parts) into this, no less!
I love this stream and watch it all the time.
I’m not a big broodwar fan myself (or at least I wasn’t back then)
This kind of blew my mind a little bit. To think that you went through the trouble of doing this for others when you weren't even a diehard fan yourself. Much respect.
Big thanks to snipealot and his mods for making this stream awesome and keeping it going 24/7.
On February 02 2013 02:39 jetburger wrote: Wow, I knew there was a certain amount of effort on your part to keep the stream running, but I had no idea. And you were actually sinking money (computer parts) into this, no less!
Actually I got a ton of people asking me if they can donate, so I put up a chip-in to cover the computer parts cost (rougly 45$). The chip-in was completed in a few days though so I guess most people didn't see it. I should've put that in the blog, I'll edit it in now
I seriously love what you're doing. I watch the stream all the time and love that BW refuses to give up :D I might have moved onto SC2 but I still need my fix of BW. Please never stop! <3
On February 01 2013 22:49 Epoxide wrote: I love you.
Same here, always watch your stream whenever I have some time and want to relax
"[...]and afreeca currently developing an English client to move into the international market..." Sounds like bad news unless they separate Korean streamers and foreign viewers.
It shocks me that you're unable to attain a twitch partnership. Your stream is by far the best bw stream out there and, as you've said, maintains viewer hours that rival top sc2 streamers.
Your stream is a boon to the BW community -- you and your stream operators are doing an amazing job
We did attain partnership early January, but yeah it was kind of annoying not getting it earlier. Though their reasoning was kind of valid as transcoding takes processing power - and a 24/7 stream needs 24/7 transcoding.
Honestly I would love to run two streams at least 24/7 but the biggest issue is moderators. We're barely scraping by as it is :p It would be possible if there were like 20 more mods.
Yeah this is incredible dedication, Im so happy to have someone who cares so much about the bw community. I hope the streaming continues even after Afreeca re-establishes itself. For anyone who hasn't watched the stream, it is definitely worth checking out, it is well maintained, surprisingly so, there is always friendly mods looking after things.
This blog post is amazing. Great work man, and seriously I appreciate this to no end. Not only is the stream always seeming to run with perfection whenever I tune in but the chat is always friendly and helpful. Even if it does end up obsolete as you mentioned as a possibility, I'll remember what you have done. Thanks a lot snipealot, keep it up.
I did NOT know how much dedication that it all required, just wow. Looking at the continual improvement there...what a fantastic job. Just keeps on getting better
This is really funny. I see your name in the stream list every time I'm on TL, and the last few weeks I've been thinking "Jesus, this guy plays a lot of BW."
Now that I know the truth, I'm really impressed by what you're pulling off. It's a remarkable contribution to the TL community, and I'll make sure to tune in from time to time.
but one day I decided to take it to the next level
Need more people like you. I can't believe you left your laptop out on the balcony lol. Where would we be without you and the moderators. Thanks for all the effort you and the moderators put in <3
On February 02 2013 08:53 rauk wrote: you are awesome
but will you consider having 3 streams each dedicated to a race :p
Please do this :D
We would need at least 15+ mods for that and a lot of computers streaming. Plus, not all 3 races are represented all the time on afreeca especially at 3-4am in Korea time.
5/5 will read again and again and again. Wow that's sentence felt like snipe's stream, it never ends. Thank you for providing content to which I can satisfy my addiction to Korean SC.
how are your power/internet bills? are the streaming pcs dying from 24/7 streaming?
really appreciate what you do along with the others, when i was in korea watching afreeca was awesome and i was a little sad to have trouble viewing at times back in the states.
Things are surprisingly stable in general, it does seem like a miracle that the laptop(currently on snipealot3) is still alive though. It's winter so my power bill is very low and bandwidth is of course not capped here in Korea.
EPT
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