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Williowa
129 Posts
Considering only the top 20% get anything for their effort, it wouldn't be good to force people to miss work or otherwise just to play the HDH many weeks in a row. I think forcing specific times wouldn't have destroyed the tournament, but it would have limited who decided to play and what's the point of that? Live or not you're watching the same game and there's no amount of cheering and screaming at your computer that's going to change the result. Keep it up Husky and HD. | ||
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ryanjm
United States3 Posts
On May 05 2010 10:54 HDstarcraft wrote: April 21st - May 11th Like Husky said, we are right on schedule  I think the length of the tourney is the main problem and the reason people are always asking questions about when games will be posted. It would be much simpler if the tourney was done over 1 week and then all that needed to be done was a cast of the replays. The quality on Youtube is so much better than the livestream that it's worth waiting imo. But really, 3 weeks for guys to play an avg of 10-15 min matches is waaaay too much time. This is for money, right? How hard is it for these guys to set aside an hour of their day to play these matches? I like the games though and the effort that HD and Husky are putting in is appreciated. It's fun to watch and 720p is the nuts. Only thing that needs fixing is making a "tournament" that doesn't last a month. | ||
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Primadog
United States4411 Posts
On May 05 2010 13:25 Williowa wrote: Live or not you're watching the same game and there's no amount of cheering and screaming at your computer that's going to change the result. . I beg to differ: When watching football I (and the millions of other Irish fans) scream, yell, and kick at the screen all the time and it works... except when it doesn't, so don't put your scientific mumble jumble over us and let us keep our superstitions :p | ||
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sword_siege
United States624 Posts
Cheers!  | ||
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alfybet
United States57 Posts
On May 05 2010 13:27 ryanjm wrote: I think the length of the tourney is the main problem and the reason people are always asking questions about when games will be posted. It would be much simpler if the tourney was done over 1 week and then all that needed to be done was a cast of the replays. The quality on Youtube is so much better than the livestream that it's worth waiting imo. But really, 3 weeks for guys to play an avg of 10-15 min matches is waaaay too much time. This is for money, right? How hard is it for these guys to set aside an hour of their day to play these matches? I like the games though and the effort that HD and Husky are putting in is appreciated. It's fun to watch and 720p is the nuts. Only thing that needs fixing is making a "tournament" that doesn't last a month. I wouldn't mind if the tourney was even longer. Seems like the last 2 rounds will be crammed in a week? Games are better to watch when players have more time to prepare for that specific matchup. I think this tourney is big enough to have the weekly schedules of OSL/MSL/TSL. | ||
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Aether
Canada123 Posts
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TotalBiscuit
United Kingdom5437 Posts
On May 05 2010 16:52 Aether wrote: Do you guys have a different stream lined up this time? livestream crashed completely and ustream was giving a lot of people trouble, buffering frequently and giving black screens. Are there plans for a different stream? Well I think the question would be, what alternatives are there? Unless you have a company backing you with phat phat pipes and solid servers capable of handling the load, any free streaming provider you choose is going to implode with that many people watching it. Just do the math, they had what, 10k people last time? Take Livestream's 500kbps limit, x that by 10000. Enjoy using 5Gbps or finding any free provider willing to let you use that kind of muscle. Now tmultiply that by an hour. Rough calculation, 5000x60x60/8/1000 (let's ignore the 1024 for the time being just for convenience) = 2.25 terrabytes per hour. Perish the thought they'd want to broadcast in HD. So really, there are a few options available to avoid the problem of free streaming services imploding whenever HDH goes live. 1) A Peer2Peer video setup. Takes the load off of the servers, unfortunately also has a tendency to suck and not work half the time. Octoshape would be the best bet. 2) Sponsorship - Convince a company with that kind of bandwidth that they can make more money via advertising than they'd lose by providing that kind of bandwidth and hardware. This is probably the most likely option long-term. 3) Go independent - Rent a cluster of servers with the bandwidth required in order to handle said broadcasts. Pay for it by attracting sponsors and offering in-video advertising, ie. properly produced commercials between matches rather than intrusive banner pop-ups a'la Ustream. Throw in some unintrusive banner advertising for extra revenue on various pages of the site. Depending on how often such shows would go live, it's easy enough to calculate how much traffic you're going to get every month and buy a package with a suitable allowance. Problem is finding a provider that could give you that much simultaneous throughput (and more if you go any higher than 500kbps video) as well as attracting enough sponsors to keep it going. 10,000 sounds like a lot but TL gets almost 300k unique hits PER DAY and you can buy an ad on here for as little as $3.50/day. Video advertising is more effective at delivering to a target demographic since you can't adblock it and it's more engaging, but still, you're talking about trying to sell exposure to 10,000 or so people at an extremely high cost/view ratio in order to pay for those servers. Just as an example, I pay £90 ($140) a month for my server, which has a gigabit connection and 10TB of bandwidth allowance per month. Now think that you'll need the equivalent of 5 of those connections for 10k viewers at 500kbps (most likely a little more bearing in mind overhead). It's pretty daunting and it's also why free live video streaming services tend to implode when faced with the popularity of HD/Husky/Day9, they're bleeding money out of the ass whenever they go on air, not making it (can you honestly say that you're all clicking the ads rather than blocking them?). Now that's not the broadcaster's fault, it's a broken business model on the part of the streaming providers, who should be directly working with the broadcasters to setup proper sponsorship deals with video advertising, rather than easily blocked and annoying popups which obscure the action and are barely relevant to the subject matter at hand. Anyway, that's just a few thoughts on the matter. It's in everyone's best interests that things like HDH continue to grow and right now it seems the technical limitations of these streaming providers are holding them back. | ||
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HDstarcraft
United States577 Posts
On May 05 2010 17:44 TotalBiscuit wrote: Well I think the question would be, what alternatives are there? Unless you have a company backing you with phat phat pipes and solid servers capable of handling the load, any free streaming provider you choose is going to implode with that many people watching it. Just do the math, they had what, 10k people last time? Take Livestream's 500kbps limit, x that by 10000. Enjoy using 5Gbps or finding any free provider willing to let you use that kind of muscle. Now tmultiply that by an hour. Rough calculation, 5000x60x60/8/1000 (let's ignore the 1024 for the time being just for convenience) = 2.25 terrabytes per hour. Perish the thought they'd want to broadcast in HD. So really, there are a few options available to avoid the problem of free streaming services imploding whenever HDH goes live. 1) A Peer2Peer video setup. Takes the load off of the servers, unfortunately also has a tendency to suck and not work half the time. Octoshape would be the best bet. 2) Sponsorship - Convince a company with that kind of bandwidth that they can make more money via advertising than they'd lose by providing that kind of bandwidth and hardware. This is probably the most likely option long-term. 3) Go independent - Rent a cluster of servers with the bandwidth required in order to handle said broadcasts. Pay for it by attracting sponsors and offering in-video advertising, ie. properly produced commercials between matches rather than intrusive banner pop-ups a'la Ustream. Throw in some unintrusive banner advertising for extra revenue on various pages of the site. Depending on how often such shows would go live, it's easy enough to calculate how much traffic you're going to get every month and buy a package with a suitable allowance. Problem is finding a provider that could give you that much simultaneous throughput (and more if you go any higher than 500kbps video) as well as attracting enough sponsors to keep it going. 10,000 sounds like a lot but TL gets almost 300k unique hits PER DAY and you can buy an ad on here for as little as $3.50/day. Video advertising is more effective at delivering to a target demographic since you can't adblock it and it's more engaging, but still, you're talking about trying to sell exposure to 10,000 or so people at an extremely high cost/view ratio in order to pay for those servers. Just as an example, I pay £90 ($140) a month for my server, which has a gigabit connection and 10TB of bandwidth allowance per month. Now think that you'll need the equivalent of 5 of those connections for 10k viewers at 500kbps (most likely a little more bearing in mind overhead). It's pretty daunting and it's also why free live video streaming services tend to implode when faced with the popularity of HD/Husky/Day9, they're bleeding money out of the ass whenever they go on air, not making it (can you honestly say that you're all clicking the ads rather than blocking them?). Now that's not the broadcaster's fault, it's a broken business model on the part of the streaming providers, who should be directly working with the broadcasters to setup proper sponsorship deals with video advertising, rather than easily blocked and annoying popups which obscure the action and are barely relevant to the subject matter at hand. Anyway, that's just a few thoughts on the matter. It's in everyone's best interests that things like HDH continue to grow and right now it seems the technical limitations of these streaming providers are holding them back. Couldn't have said it better regarding our past history of streaming issues TotalBiscuit! If Husky and I had the money to pay for a dedicated server to stream for HDH and other future events, we no doubt would. But at the moment, its completely out of our price range/pockets. Btw, I must say... I love your shoutcraft | ||
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TotalBiscuit
United Kingdom5437 Posts
On May 05 2010 18:03 HDstarcraft wrote: Couldn't have said it better regarding our past history of streaming issues TotalBiscuit! If Husky and I had the money to pay for a dedicated server to stream for HDH and other future events, we no doubt would. But at the moment, its completely out of our price range/pockets. Btw, I must say... I love your shoutcraft Thanks HD, that's very flattering from a man of your standing. You guys are doing great work with HDH. Hopefully we'll have the opportunity to work together sometime. I'll continue to ask around, see if there are some alternate solutions. WoW Radio streamed Blizzcon 2005 video to an awful lot of people before Ustream etc even existing, I'll try and find out how exactly we did that, maybe there's a way around the problem. I have a feeling we had some pretty hefty backing at that point, I can't recall, I was just a lowly grunt in the organisation back then. In the meantime, it might be worth having a think about a proposal, trying to attract sponsorship for an independent streaming site for SC2 to host such things in future. It wouldn't happen overnight, but there is potential there for a viable business model that could break even and pay it's own costs. There are technical challenges in streaming video from a cluster of servers, particularly without the convenience of Procaster and the like, but it's worth thinking about. If you could get the site to relay the video to streaming sites as well, you'd have a set of viable mirrors to alleviate strain. I am aware that Youtube is fucking you over because they don't allow those who use game-footage to be partners (with the exception of Machinima.com... hypocrites). That's a real bitch, the ad revenue would be extremely useful for financing such a project. They least they could do is unlock your 10-minute limit. Anyway, best of luck! | ||
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Starfox
Austria699 Posts
Friday, May 7th 13:00 PST > Friday, May 07 9:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) Saturday, May 8th 13:00 PST > Saturday, May 08 9:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) Would be nice for people from eu etc., like me | ||
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HDstarcraft
United States577 Posts
On May 05 2010 18:47 Starfox wrote: Can you use the "date" functions on the forumposts for your stream timings? Friday, May 7th 13:00 PST > Friday, May 07 9:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) Saturday, May 8th 13:00 PST > Saturday, May 08 9:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) Would be nice for people from eu etc., like me How do you do that? | ||
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TotalBiscuit
United Kingdom5437 Posts
If I recall correctly, you surround the time with the (date)(/date) tag, like so. (use square brackets instead of round for the tag to work). Wednesday, May 05 8:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) Example :- [INSERTTAGHERE]Wednesday, May 5th 12:00 PST[/INSERTTAGHERE] That will show the time local to the community member automatically. | ||
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f_Ce
Germany29 Posts
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Demand2k
Norway875 Posts
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Odoakar
Croatia1838 Posts
On that note, I thought last stream had 3x10 000 viewers, someone mentioned there being 3 channels for stream, would that mean the actual bandwidth usage was triple of the numbers you mentioned? I was actually for a while watching on 2 channels just to see if there was really more than 10k people watching, and there were different people in chat rooms, and one channel had a video/sound delayed compared to first one. | ||
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Stormzors
Australia41 Posts
http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/7034/666999views.jpg 666999 views! | ||
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TotalBiscuit
United Kingdom5437 Posts
On May 05 2010 20:15 Odoakar wrote: Great post TotalBiscuit, that's some interesting stuff. On that note, I thought last stream had 3x10 000 viewers, someone mentioned there being 3 channels for stream, would that mean the actual bandwidth usage was triple of the numbers you mentioned? If that was actually the case then yes, which is even more horrifying in terms of the sheer cost of that. If you had say a Premium Livestream channel, which would already cost you $350 per month, you get 3000 viewer hours with that. An hour of HDH would eat that up, plus 7,000 extra, then 10,000 extra viewer hours every hour it went on. If it had the 30,000 that may have been the case over 3 simultaneous streams, that's a total of 60,000 viewer hours for a 2 hour show. Take off those 'complimentary' 3000 viewer hours and you have 57,000 viewer hours still to pay for. You can stream HDH for the bargain price of $15,000 per show! (jesus christ). And that's assuming by the way, that Livestream has servers equipped to handle that kind of cpu and memory load and that they're properly balanced to take that load across multiple boxes dynamically, which they may very well not be. It boggles the mind just how utterly impractical Livestream's business model actually is. It's not cost effective on any level, either large or small scale, for anyone to ever use Livestream Premium and Livestream Free is fraught with problems and monetised by ads that are not properly targetted at the demographic in question and are easily blocked by the net-savvy people that watch these kind of streams. If we were to look at the numbers based on my previous calculations then multiply those by 3, that's 15Gbps (dear lord). The provider I use goes up to 10Gbps max per box (and those boxes cost around £300 a month minimum, plus setup fees, plus they throttle the hell out of your connection if you exceed 40TB traffic a month). 2 of those boxes would suffice for 500kbps streaming to 30,000 people. Give em 1mbps which would provide nice quality in 720p and you're looking at 15,000 people. Then look at bandwidth used. We said what, 2.25TB per hour for 10,000 at 500kbps? that's 7.75TB for 30,000 at 500kbps, 7.75TB for 15,000 at 1mbps (again, approximately numbers, not accounting for overhead). 40/7.75, yeah, that's not a lot of hours before your provider tells you to sling your hook. There are no doubt other providers more equipped to deal with sporadic bursts of extreme traffic with priceplans more suitable, but still, it's a big investment whatever way you look at it. Daunting isn't it? What we have on our hands is a rapidly growing interest in a scene that has literally no feasible way to provide large numbers of people with streaming live video and the 3 main providers of what streaming facilities exist are all built on doomed business models with no apparent willingness to work with any broadcaster who doesn't have corporate backing, regardless of the size of their audience. Bloody hell. Anyway that's all hypothetical. The hope would be that Livestream, Justin.tv or Ustream see sense and enter into an agreement which is mutually beneficial to both parties. Then again, that would involve internet businesses getting it into their heads that banner advertising is nowhere near as powerful as it used to be and that innovation is required in advertising media online. Let me tell you from personal experience, getting that message across to people like that is absurdly hard. It took me 6 years to monetise my podcast correctly because people who do business online have an irrational fear of multimedia advertising. | ||
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KinosJourney2
Sweden1811 Posts
Really happy you guys are doing this, gonna start working my way up from Ro16 now CHEERS :D | ||
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HazMat
United States17077 Posts
Also, will you be spoiling Fridays games on Saturdays stream? | ||
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ranirahn
Estonia34 Posts
Go there http://www.7is7.com/otto/countdclock.html But right time and even can type name there about what this is and then bush "Generate short URL" button. Then copy paste link here. Then I see exactly when stream starting. Thanks | ||
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