EPTTo the StarCraft community,
As the Content Director at DingIt, I am in the privileged position to allocate our funding to various eSport and gaming content worldwide. Having launched into our Beta back in Feb’15, we have been fortunate to have got such passionate thoughts and feedback on our service that has helped to shape where we are today and will continue to help plan our future development and growth. The StarCraft community has had a major role to play in this, in no small part due to us committing a large portion of our content budget to StarCraft events during 2015. We have supported multiple showmatches and leagues (notably ASL) that have seen both up and coming players given the chance to compete as well as provide a regular event series for pro players around the globe. In 2015 alone we spent over $60,000 supporting 160+ broadcasts (that’s nearly a broadcast every other day since we launched for SC2.)
As part of our continued growth plan in 2016, we had the opportunity to sponsor StarLeague. Being big fans of StarCraft, the opportunity to support one of the best leagues was really exciting. It also allows us to test the demand for premier level StarCraft 2 and will help shape our content investment in the game throughout 2016. We have also heard loud and clear some of the communities concerns about StarLeague being exclusively on DingIt and I will do my best to address the main points in this post.
HD quality won't be paywalled going forward
One of the benefits of DingIt is that we can provide true 1080p, 60 fps quality for less bitrate than other platforms meaning more viewers can enjoy seeing the streams in the best possible quality. For the vast majority of the content we produce we have this quality open to all, free of charge. SPOTV wanted HD to be behind a paywall for StarLeague, but with the help of community feedback we have been able to negotiate this to be removed going forward.
Increasing Viewership
With StarLeague being an established, premier event, there are expectations of viewership. Moving this event to not only a new channel but a new streaming platform will always see an initial decrease in viewers, but what is reassuring is the increase in viewership we are seeing week on week. Unique viewers from week 2 to 3 increased by 3x and peak concurrent increase 2.3x - a trend we expect to continue. We aren’t however complacent and have put some strategies in place on a global basis to dedicate some of our marketing and advertising specifically to StarLeague to attract both existing and new StarCraft fans.
Additionally, DingIt is a sustainable platform that is already in profit and as a result we are able to fuel more investment in content. We are committed to the gaming communities that we invest in for the long term and StarCraft is a part of that. We intend to continue and expand our investment into both existing and new StarCraft content to help grow the community.
Advertising Quality
Dingit is a business that is advertiser funded, meaning we are able to commit content investment as a result of bringing in advertising revenue. Back in Sept 2015, we had some issues with ads that were directing users to less desirable content which we immediately remedied. We work hard to make sure that the advertising that our audience sees is relevant and appropriate. To do this, we constantly monitor the kinds of ads that are delivered, but as a global platform, occasionally ads get through which we are not happy with. Ad providers that try to push through unsuitable ads of any description are removed from our platform immediately. We will continue to refine and improve the way we ensure that the ads are high quality.
Preventing Adblock
As you may be aware, creating content and then providing a stream costs quite a lot of money.. We have developed an adblock prevention system so that we can generate enough money to pay our content creators / players and casters a decent wage and continue to invest in new broadcasts. If users prefer not to have adverts, there is the option to subscribe either to the channel or site wide to remove ads.
The Plugin/Chrome Extension
This section is going to be a little longer, as I have liaised with our technical team to give a more detailed answer to why it is needed.
To address a few often raised concerns, the plugin/extension does not contain any malicious software, it does not utilise P2P, is not using your computer to mine bitcoins and does not steal your secret SC2 build orders. The only use of the plugin is to allow your browser to display the stream. The technology is built in partnership with Akamai and is featured on the Apple App Store and Google Play store.
Why DingIt uses a different system for streaming to other platforms? There are two main reasons; cost and quality.
From a cost perspective, the systems that run other streaming platforms are hugely expensive (both infrastructure and ongoing costs.) As a result, the profit generated from advertising is low and content creators don’t make much money from revenue shares. You only need to look at the reliance of broadcasters on subscriptions / donations to see how much of an issue this is. Subscriptions / donations only come from a small % of the total audience. The cost savings our tech allows for greater profit per viewer which in turn allows our broadcasters and content creators to generate much better revenue per viewer and creates a much more sustainable eSports eco-system. The cost savings are only becoming more important as the demand for HD, 60fps and 4k etc increases.
From a quality perspective, a standard TCP video stream was never built to handle live video streams, let alone HD streams. As a result, viewers can often experience large stream delay, buffering and quality loss which is especially noticeable if you are not geographically near infrastructure of the streaming platform.
So how is DingIt different? Working with Akamai (the world's largest CDN) we created a much more efficient system to deliver a video stream to the end user. It isn’t just one step that provides this benefit but multiple steps which together provide a significant benefit. A traditional video stream goes from the broadcaster, to the ingest server, to the transcode server, to the CDN and finally to the viewer. Each step results in a loss of quality, increase in delay and a chance for error which could result in buffering. With DingIt, thanks to our own broadcast app and the Akamai stream acceleration technology, the broadcast goes directly from the broadcaster to the CDN and on to the end user. This revolutionary method of stream delivery removes a lot of the steps that traditional platforms have to follow and as a result, provide the following benefits for the viewer; far less buffering, a much reduced stream delay and more stable stream experience which provides the same quality as other platforms, but for a lower bitrate. This means more viewers can enjoy HD streams, worldwide. The work we have done with Akamai is significant for video streaming as a whole, not just gaming and as a result we were invited to speak at the Akamai Edge conference in 2015.
The plugin is required because the browser alone cannot work with our streaming technology as it isn’t able to decode the UDP stream. All the plugin does is decode the UDP stream. We also developed the Chrome extension as a direct response to users who didn’t want to install a .exe to watch, although globally the plugin is the preferred method of viewing.
If you want more information about our tech, the following links are useful:
- What the plugin does
- Explaining the Dingit Infrastructure, Part 1
- Explaining the Dingit Infrastructure, Part 2
- DingIt’s talk at Akamai Edge (2nd to last on this page)
Again, thank you all for your feedback on the platform. We do listen to all of your feedback and make changes where and when possible. There is constantly development going on to improve DingIt, and while announcements may not be instant there is always progress being made!
If you have any questions, leave a comment and I will do my best to answer as many as I can.
Looking forward to watching the rest of StarLeague with you all!
Adam “Madals” Simmons - Content Director, DingIt TV
