3 million views - 10 months of 24/7 broodwar

As some of you may know, when I moved here to Korea last summer to study Korean I wasn’t really a big broodwar fan. Although I always knew broodwar was big in Korea, I’ve still to this day probably watched more pro counter-strike broadcasts from Korea than broodwar, namely thanks to WEG. I started browsing TL back in 2010 due to getting into SC2, and over time I saw the userbase grow immensely. Even though this growth has helped TL grow from what I understand was a rather small community website into an esports powerhouse, it seemed as if the very foundation TL was built upon was withering away as a result. I had a laptop lying around gathering dust that I started restreaming afreeca on mid-september last year to see if I could help bring some much needed broodwar content to an old broodwar website. For the first 2-3 weeks I was mostly doing it for fun in the spare time I had, mostly only restreaming afreeca when I was watching it myself to improve my Korean listening skills.

After hearing about sospa and Sonic, the remaining bastion of (semi)pro broodwar in Korea, I started streaming from my main computer as well - dual-streaming the early rounds of SSL7. With the overwhelming support I received doing that I decided to ask if anyone would be interested in helping out with a 24/7 broodwar project, outlining my plan on the TL broodwar forum. The stream was brought online on the 7th of October last year. It was set up primarily for the TL community, so it was fitting that it was only made possible by the TL community. Even with the influx of viewers from other sources, the TL users still make up the overwhelming majority of the moderator-group.
This was the setup for a while until I decided to move the laptop into the living room:

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We’ve come a long way since then; I would say the biggest change happened right after Christmas. I brought some computer parts with me from Norway in order to set up a proper streaming computer. The jump in quality was immense, though I am 8 months later still looking for ways to improve the stream. We had a big surge in viewers late December/early January thanks to a certain TL player named Sea retiring from SC2 and starting up his own afreeca stream. These first 4 months were pretty crazy, but we did manage to keep the downtime to a minimum thanks to a hard working moderator team. Anyone looking for specific statistics can take a look at my previous blog.

Right after I wrote my previous blog I started getting busy with school. I had been spending more time on the stream than studying for the first month of level 4 (10 weeks per level), meaning I had pretty much zero time to manage the stream in February in order to catch up before the final exams. Between intensive studying and my girlfriend I barely had time to even add new moderators. The downtime increased and the viewership numbers went down this month, something that I still feel sorry for. The overwhelming amount of commercials for heart of the swarm also probably contributed to a renewed sc2 interest (and consequent decline in broodwar interest) for a lot of old broodwar fans that were initially disappointed with wings of liberty.

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In the middle of February Sonic announced the SSL8 with a preliminary ranking tournament for the group stage ceremony. Both the ranking tournament and group stage ceremony increased viewership somewhat, but as is usually the problem with such events – a lot of the amateur players had no first person views available. And what was worse, Sonic announced that the entire SSL8 would be played offline. Now that’s not to say I’m in any way opposed to this; running the entire league offline makes it all seem a lot more professional and serious. That said, the intimate first person views from afreeca were what made snipe2 popular in the first place. The SSL7 had online stages that gave snipe2 the jumpstart it needed when we got started last year; SSL8 would in essence drive viewers away (to snipealot3, the Chinese restream and finally the official TL stream) on gamenight. In spite of this, the increased exposure broodwar got from SSL8 most probably helped increase the viewership in March.

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Ever since we started restreaming Sonic during the early rounds of SSL7, there has been much debate regarding the “ratio issue”. Should Sonic be restreamed in his afreeca-broadcasted 16

resolution, or should the aspect ratio be changed to 4:3 for the foreign viewers? Although we did go a bit back and forth in the beginning we did end up settling on the 16

resolution. However as we were still receiving complaints about this we decided to set up snipe2 to restream Sonic in 4:3 on SSL nights. This was a huge success and helped us mitigate the decline going into April.

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All throughout March I had been trying to find some spare time to go watch the SSL in person. As the new semester had just started, I finally found the time to go visit the shinbalfarm early April. It was a blast as I got to meet a couple of pretty suave dudes.

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I showed up at shinbalfarm right before the broadcast, something that probably made Sonic a tad stressed as he felt the need to personally greet me. He was understandably busy for most of the broadcast, but that just gave me the opportunity to talk to the other broodwar personalities there. After the matches Sonic invited me for a late dinner with him, Kim Carrier, larva and a few of the other guys behind the ssl8. We mostly just talked about video games and video game culture in Korea - Kim Carrier seemed slightly disappointed that I didn’t enjoy neither playing nor watching league of legends. After dinner Sonic insisted on paying for my cab fare as the subways were closed.

Towards the end of April / Beginning of May I started getting busy again with school, so I had no opportunity to return to shinbalfarm for the rest of SSL8. Despite reaching a milestone of 2 million views, the numbers were starting to decline. Luckily we managed to recruit some more moderators to maintain the uptime going into May.

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In May we can see pretty big spikes on Sonic broadcast nights, namely a KOTH on the 10th and the SSL8 Semifinals on the 11th. Another spike happened towards the end of the month due to Sonic deciding to run an SRT between the SSL8 Semis and the Grand Final. However with summer approaching I started getting worried about power consumption. As my electricity cost is tiered my bill reached $500/month in July and August of last year, so with forecasts of extreme heat and spiking electricity costs I started getting worried that having 2 computers running 24/7 would have an impact on my utility bill. After doing some calculations I came to the conclusion that it would probably not exceed $200 in total over the 4 summer months (June-September), but that was still a rather large sum for me to pay out of pocket. The donation drive in January to cover computer parts for the new streaming computer was pretty successful, so I decided to open up for donations again after asking if it was okay on the TL forums. Thanks to the generous broodwar community this amount was covered in just a few weeks.

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June started with a bang – not just figuratively as the PSU on snipealot2 got fried right at the beginning of the SSL8 grand finals broadcast. I was on my computer making sure snipealot3 was running correctly when my girlfriend screamed from the living room that something was burning. I figured I had no time to fix it in time for the broadcast that had just started, so I simply set up my main computer as a restream to snipealot2. Despite this minor drawback, snipealot2 quickly set a new concurrent viewer record at 962 viewers. A legend match with Yellow and Reach, no mirrors, a ton of kpop – with hours upon hours of entertainment it was almost to be expected. Still, between the official TL cast, the Chinese cast and snipealot3 broadcasting the Korean cast, I was surprised to see the numbers go that high.

I managed to get snipealot2 running again properly the next day, but it was prone to crashes whenever the power fluctuated. As you can see on the graph got pretty bad and drove down numbers in the days following the ssl8 finals. I was also worried for the rest of the month because electricity in Seoul during summer isn’t exactly stable, and I was leaving for a 2 week vacation to Norway on the 8th.

During my vacation two major events happened. The first being snipealot2 setting a new concurrent viewer record at a staggering 1118 on the 16th. The second was the streaming computer having a complete crash on the 21st. Some smart moderators brought the snipe3 laptop online and advertised for that stream in the snipe2 chat though, and when I got online I switched the streamkey on the laptop to snipealot2. This helped bring some viewers back but going back to the laptop stream quality after 6 months was horrendous. I arrived back in Korea a few days later and managed to get the computer running again, bringing everything back to normal. Sonic decided on the midst of all this to do host another ranking tournament, giving the numbers a decent boost moving into July.

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As is always the case during the summer months, people tend to spend less time in front of their computers. This led to a decline in both viewers and active moderators. After finishing up SRT14 on the 4th, Sonic almost immediately announced SRT15 with a pretty big sponsor (iStarPC Mall). With a prize pool that rivals the earlier SSLs, the SRT helped keep the numbers at least on par with June. Although the SRT15 Ro32 groups were pretty one-sided and lacking in first person views, the Ro16 from the 23rd to 26th and the Ro8 on the final two days of the month both contributed to a nice increase in viewer hours.

Although unrelated to the stream, I should mention that we managed to facilitate a showmatch between the TLS2 finalists and the popular ex. T8 Progamer 진영화 aka Movie. He agreed to play the showmatch simply to help out TL and reach out to the foreign community, but after discussing it with the TL bw staff and asking the community we decided to donate $20 out of the stream revenue to Movie for his efforts. Click here for a highlight of the donation. The donation wasn’t huge, but Movie did seem to appreciate it.

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The above picture shows the monthly graph for hours watched and video plays from February – July. Although the amount of video plays stagnated and declined, the amount of viewer hours actually increased slightly. Thus we can deduce that in spite of falling total viewers, the amount of regulars putting in more hours watching is increasing. With more regulars and the end of summer vacations in August/September, the viewer count should go up somewhat in the coming months.

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By separating the video plays by country we do see some interesting statistics. As expected the two big nations are China and the United States. Together they account for almost half of the views on any given day. There are a lot of other nations I haven’t listed that are just below the 5000-mark, Vietnam, France, Peru, Romania, the UK, Denmark and Ukraine just to name a few.

Since day one people have been complaining about the amount of Chinese being spoken in the chat. If we look at the Chinese video plays in relation to the total video plays, how will that look?

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As you can see, there has been a steady increase in Chinese viewers since February. The delayed release of HotS in China might have contributed to this. With HotS being released in China mid-july, we might be seeing a decrease again in the coming months. Still, for as long as twitch is accessible through the great firewall of china, the Chinese will probably account for a lot of the viewers on snipe2. The chat will always be multi-lingual, so if people want more English they will simply have to start participating in the chat more.

Another common complaint ever since we got the twitch partnership has been the amount of ads on stream. Before twitch overhauled the system you would click the commercial break button and it would run a 30 second ad segment, then you would have to click it again for another 30 seconds etc. You could click this button as much as you want, leading to a few streamers abusing the system. A slightly intoxicated CellaWerra spamming the button over and over for hours at the request of his viewers - “MORE ADS” - comes to mind. The new system twitch introduced in February made it possible to select the duration of a commercial ad break – up to a total of 3 minutes – however it was now impossible to run a break more often than every 8 minutes. As we have no way of knowing how fast a player will get into a new game, this made things a lot harder for the moderators on snipealot2. After some trial and error however, we ended up with a system that is honestly pretty good. For the everyday restreams we do 60second breaks after games, and during Sonic events we do 120-150second breaks depending on the type of event. This works pretty well, although viewers sometimes miss the worker-split at the start of games. The best thing about this new system is that twitch now tracks the amount of seconds spent in commercial breaks. This lets us do cool things like this:

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This graph shows the average amount seconds per hour spent in running commercials. This doesn’t mean that anyone watching the stream for 1 hour will get exactly 84 seconds of ads as this varies throughout the day. Someone watching between 6PM and midnight KST will probably watch more ads than someone watching between 6AM and noon KST. On the other hand, a moderator running a 2 minute ad break does not mean you will get 2 minutes of ads during that break. Depending on where you are from and how many ads twitch manages to sell in your area, you might get: no ads at all, the full 2 minutes or more likely - something in between. The average seconds per hour does however give us a pretty good idea for how many ads a regular viewer gets. A viewer watching 10 hours of snipealot2 would be exposed to an average maximum of 14 minutes of ads. If you compare this to 3 hours of ads per 10 hours watching television in the united states, this doesn’t seem like such a bad deal.

In the months ahead there are a few things that I will have to sort out. I’ll be moving back to Norway around mid-December with my girlfriend to live there for at least 1 year. All the personal issues that need to be sorted aside, this does mean that I probably won’t be able to manage snipealot2 after Christmas – at least not directly. I’ll be actively looking for alternative hosting, but I cannot promise anything. If I do end up having to shut everything down here in Korea I’ll be looking for a way to do the exact same thing from Norway. The last time I was there only the commercials posed a problem when I tried watching afreeca streams.

No matter what the future may bring, the past 10 months have been amazing. Thanks to the TL broodwar community, the TL broodwar staff, the amazing moderator team and last but not least Sonic and his afreeca posse, broodwar has managed to survive – both in Korea and abroad. Between TLS, SRT, SSL and the massive amount of content being produced on both afreeca and on twitch, things are only looking bright for the future.

There will be no final chapter for broodwar.

The stream heroes:
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Mokegaye, ty152, Cecilsunkure, Harmtaro, Rlentless, Nekotrap, nnspd, stratosj, skmetaly, Iplaythings, Fold, Procyonarc, JaValeMcgeee, chnama, vOddySC, Komre_cl, Comradexkcd, function1983, Kristofferag, GasMaskSociety, RedW4rr10r, Rekzr, Seroqt, Hellokritty, Epoxide, ImmortalToss, Mf_bakuryu, bioboyAT, Aeghrur, Rui_xm

The players we all love to watch:
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Killer, Pusan, Anytime, Mong, HiyA, Sky, Zergman, minus)eagle, Sexy, Beast, Icarus, Cola, Perfectman, Tyson, StarCue, minus)Zelot, Movie, Shuttle, by.hero, kkong_v_, Liquid’Sea, Nada, Jat.lotte, Larva, Shinee, Perry, KT.MGW)Terran, Lazy, Hint, He)Jy, By.Spire, Sonkwon, Onicle, Horang2, union’feat, sSak, Notice, Rapsodytoss, Air, Olympus, envy.Bisu, The Rock, NoraJo, Autumn, nto’smile, Best, Dove, Brave

And finally, the best stargirl broodwar has ever seen:

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- snipealot

3 million views - 10 months of 24/7 broodwar

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