Welcome to Azubucom This is Azubucom Welcome This is Azubucom Welcome to Azubucom You can do anything at Azubucom Anything at all The only limited is yourself Welcome to Azubucom Welcome to Azubucom This is Azubucom Welcome to Azubucom This is Azubucom Welcome Yes, this is Azubucom This is Azubucom And welcome to, you have come to Azubucom Anything is possible at Azubucom You can do anything at Azubucom This infinite is possible at Azubucom The unattainable is unknown at Azubucom Welcome to Azubucom This is Azubucom
I don't really buy this since Azubu outsource their streaming infrastructure. They aren't really creating anything, they are paying Brightcove for their white label streaming service so this money that is "going into esports" goes right back out as soon as they get their bandwidth bill. A bunch of people at Clauf / Azubu / etc will get rich, the investor funds will eventually dry out after being wasted on outsourced technology and ridiculously expensive studios and then the whole thing is written off as a failed investment because "consumers aren't ready for esports" or something. In the long run this will only end up hurting esports by scaring off future investors.
Maybe I'm wrong and this Azubu "relaunch" is a completely new in-house streaming platform that will actually be sustainable in the long run, but I have a feeling it's going to be another website re-skin along with a big marketing budget (ie paying popular people to stream on Azubu).
Actually, when you hit a certain transfer volume, bandwidth is not that costly any more. I mean, it used to be the case a few years ago, but now, if you're big enough, you can even get Akamaï BW ofr less than 0,01$ / GB tranferred.
In the streaming business, costs can mostly be broken down as:
Staff that (developers/sysadmins/project managers) creates, maintains and updates a decent enough platform & infrastructure (server clusters), etc.
Staff that sells ad position to mainstream customers, all over the world at the highest CPM possible and manage the RTB networks to fill the remnant
Content acquisition. Deals you have to strike to steal major streamers/competitions, etc. away from competition.
Combine all of this and you get some pretty expensive operation (much more than just BW costs) :-)
I read a lot of comments on "wow, why invest that in esports?" - well just take a look at Twitch 2013 figures (12 Bn minutes watched/months), and the state of video/mobile advertising (highest CPMs ever), and you have your answer!
When you do it right, it's a pretty juicy market :-)
(Also, don't forget Twitch also raised roughly that much money - for a reason)
Azubu doesn't appear to have ads (they have some house banner ads but I've never seen a pre-roll on their video) and uses Brightcove (their bandwidth costs are some of the highest in the business). Even Twitch with their years of experience, cheap in-house bandwidth and expansive ad coverage doesn't appear to be doing that well or they would be able to pay their way out of all the QoS issues that still plague their system.
Lars Windhorst, the founder of Sapinda is also one of the men behind Azubu so no, there is no outside investment to speak of. Quite literally nothing to see here. Besides, even the Sapinda is most likely just some kind of a cover up for money laundering and scamming.
I don't know how much it cost though. In seriousness though looks like they are about to populate their youtube page with content again. "Azubu 2.0" D: rofl
On March 28 2014 03:07 atteo wrote: Lars Windhorst, the founder of Sapinda is also one of the men behind Azubu so no, there is no outside investment to speak of. Quite literally nothing to see here. Besides, even the Sapinda is most likely just some kind of a cover up for money laundering and scamming.
Lars Windhorst is not the founder, but the co-founder of Sapinda, you can look this up on wikipedia yourself.
Sapinda and Azubu are not the same coorperation.
This whole "azubu is criminal" bandwagon is based on a witch-hunt post from Richard Lewis.
His argument is, that Lars Windhorst was convicted for defalcation in 2010, this means that Sapinda must be criminal, because he is the co-founder. He mentions three other azubu staff members, which were accused and/or investigated, but none of them was convicted, but he seems to know that they are criminals, too. (maybe he sould have helped with the investigations) Sapinda has funded Azubu. Azubu is obviously criminal, too.
It seems like in the world of TLDR, it is easy to create lots of siteviews, with a story based only on speculations. There is no proof, that Azubu nor Sapinda have done anything criminal or shady, besides Richard Lewis fantasy.
On March 28 2014 03:07 atteo wrote: Lars Windhorst, the founder of Sapinda is also one of the men behind Azubu so no, there is no outside investment to speak of. Quite literally nothing to see here. Besides, even the Sapinda is most likely just some kind of a cover up for money laundering and scamming.
Lars Windhorst is not the founder, but the co-founder of Sapinda, you can look this up on wikipedia yourself.
Sapinda and Azubu are not the same coorperation.
This whole "azubu is criminal" bandwagon is based on a witch-hunt post from Richard Lewis.
His argument is, that Lars Windhorst was convicted for defalcation in 2010, this means that Sapinda must be criminal, because he is the co-founder. He mentions three other azubu staff members, which were accused and/or investigated, but none of them was convicted, but he seems to know that they are criminals, too. (maybe he sould have helped with the investigations) Sapinda has funded Azubu. Azubu is obviously criminal, too.
It seems like in the world of TLDR, it is easy to create lots of siteviews, with a story based only on speculations. There is no proof, that Azubu nor Sapinda have done anything criminal or shady, besides Richard Lewis fantasy.
I think most of the claims of shadiness rather come from the fact that they have tons and tons of money without any perspective of ever earning it back. It's just life experience that something that is too good to be true won't actually be true. You are right of course in that nobody has any facts or proof for this, but some suspicion is justified I'd say (though no reason to be witch hunting). Then again, unlike many other teams, the players on Azubu were all paid and never reported any misbehavior or unfulfilled promises by the team, so at least there is that.
On May 16 2014 07:04 dye464 wrote: This whole "azubu is criminal" bandwagon is based on a witch-hunt post from Richard Lewis.
It started with "Esports contributor: Azuwho?" that was posted one year before said article. A thread which I question that you have actually read. Just look at this one on page 12 for example. Beautiful.
You can probably find shady people and business practices at most large corporations if you dig far enough. Like take samsung for example. Let's boycott samsung's sc2/lol teams!
In 2007, its former top legal officer, Kim Yong-chul, who made his name as a star prosecutor in South Korea before joining Samsung, blew the whistle on what he said was massive corruption at the company. He accused senior executives of engaging in bribery, money-laundering, evidence tampering, stealing as much as $9 billion, and other crimes. In essence, Kim, who later wrote a book about his allegations, contended that Samsung was one of the most corrupt companies in the world.
Its money for the streaming platform why would anyone think they will be giving them to starcraft, lol, tetris or whatever pro gamer i cant understand.The Aspinda dudes are financing their new bushiness with venture capital that is all, hopefully they dont forget to pay the salaries of the clauf people before shutting it down.
EPT
