On December 22 2013 22:20 teapoted wrote: Everyone dropped WC3, should I be mad at all the tournament organisers? No, it's a business. And MLG didn't start as a SC2 organisation, people might attribute a lot of it's growth to SC2 but I find it to be quite coincidental with the rise in online streaming and eSports in general. If TL drops SC, be rightfully mad. If IEM, MLG, Dreamhack, or whatever drops SC2 then be reasonable, they have all dropped several games before to the dismay of that games audience.
Anyway Adam. What I'm most curious about is how you plan on actually getting viewers to these streams. The biggest issue with sites like YouTube or Twitch is that if you don't agree with their policies or you don't like the service they provide, the other options really aren't financially viable simply because if content discovery. A lot of sites offer better rates than YouTube for video content, but none allow you to find content as easily and have as big of a userbase to where you don't need to heavily advertise to get your work out there. If there weren't fighting game tournaments on Twitch would I have ever watched one? Probably not.
Great question. It is definitely going to be a challenge. We'll work with the streamers to leverage our social outreach, our 9million registered users, and any thing else at our disposal. In the future we will have a 'subscribe now' feature for streamers along with a redesigned website that will make finding streamers much easier.
something I heard 2gd talking bad about twitch is how awful their website looks like
I know at start you just want to stream big tournaments but in the future, if it works I think it is natural to turn into a twitch-like platform. Am I wrong?
Also, what support do you think you could give to viewers and to streamers that Twitch can't afford or doesn't have right now?
On December 21 2013 04:51 NKexquisite wrote: Eh, its no surprise they are doing this. MLG ran re-runs of old Starcraft matches and created all of these "greatest matches of all-time" type streams to continue milking the SC2 viewers without having to put out money aside from some production costs. MLG has been keeping their small pinkey toe in the SC2 scene just enough to keep their revenue streams open and this seems to be another way they are doing that.
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Just like how OGN and MBCGame used to show re-runs of previous Brood War leagues?
Ok, I will get banned or warned for this post. But I feel betrayed by MLG for dropping SC2. MLG was the only weekend subscription I ever payed for. I really loved the MLG + Day[9] combo and I decided to support it every time I could. Then SC2 got dropped because of "scheduling" issues.
I watch a lot of streams, Destiny and Day[9] especially. I will not watch them on MLG if they decide to move. I will always be biased against MLG for this and Twitch and Youtube is enough for me. This is my second post on TL ever (I think) and i've been here from SC2 Beta. I do watch LoL and Dota 2, but it will not be on MLG.
On December 23 2013 06:13 aherisanu wrote: Ok, I will get banned or warned for this post.
By all that is holy, do you see that martyrdom over there!?
On December 23 2013 06:13 aherisanu wrote: But I feel betrayed by MLG for dropping SC2. MLG was the only weekend subscription I ever payed for. I really loved the MLG + Day[9] combo and I decided to support it every time I could. Then SC2 got dropped because of "scheduling" issues.
I can't blame MLG for dropping SC2. WCS was thrown upon them at very short notice and shockingly Blizzard chose them and not NASL (who have far more experience at running and are reliant upon lengthy leagues, and actually have a studio with a live audience) as partners to operate WCS.
Oh and reddit took a steaming shit all over them for both justified and unjustified reasons. The WCS Season 1 qualifiers were a total cock-up because we saw diamond leaguers and suspected map hackers in the bracket and only 512 seeds, oh and a Chinese person unfairly disqualified in the final round; but then reddit and TL kept finding other increasingly stupid reasons to crap on them like 'We want a live audience', 'Axeltoss and Axslav suck', 'We want Bitterdam', 'NASL is dying', 'Demuslim deserved an invite', 'Who the hell is Capoch?', etc.
Oh and MLG Anaheim was delayed because of the huge commitment MLG made towards WCS and since they were no longer going to host WCS America and Red Bull hosted an event about an hour away on the same day, they saw no point in hosting SC2 at Columbus. What did we see instead? The best damn DOTA 2 event outside of The International.
Does that seem like a justifiable reason to 'drop' Starcraft 2 to you? Because it sure does to me.
On December 23 2013 06:13 aherisanu wrote: I watch a lot of streams, Destiny and Day[9] especially. I will not watch them on MLG if they decide to move. I will always be biased against MLG for this and Twitch and Youtube is enough for me. This is my second post on TL ever (I think) and i've been here from SC2 Beta. I do watch LoL and Dota 2, but it will not be on MLG.
G.G.
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Good riddance... The rest of us will think with our brains and commend the fact that MLG are actually trying to offer us an alternative to a monopolized service where streams have been unwatchable in 480p let alone HD qualities for well over a year across the other side of the Atlantic.
I remember watching MLG stream through otcoshape, old school!
Anyway, I wish you the best because competition for Twitch can only be a good thing. I think the requirements are a bit high to become an MLG Streamer but I can appreciate the fact that you want only the top quality most ball3r MLG420YOLO streamers.
I hope there are some improvements to MLG's scheduling of events, mainly in the ratio of time between showing ads and showing content. I don't have a problem with ads, but lately MLG online events show more ads than content.
On December 24 2013 01:35 odaxium wrote: I hope there are some improvements to MLG's scheduling of events, mainly in the ratio of time between showing ads and showing content. I don't have a problem with ads, but lately MLG online events show more ads than content.
Out of curiosity, did you watch MLG Columbus? Using Dota as an example we would have the following in terms of ads: -Preroll ad if you clicked on the stream for the first time -Ads after a match for 1-3 minutes
Generally we would do a 45 minute match, serve 4-6 30 second ads, throw to the analysis couch for 5 minutes, serve 4-6 30 second ads then back into game.
On December 23 2013 21:15 ultilol wrote: i hope your bandwidth providers are good and global because a lot of times mlg tournaments would lag in europe and asia (i am from asia).
Compared to Twitch I've had nothing but good performance from MLG's streams before, except MLG Dallas 2011 of course which was an unanimous disaster.
I have been expecting something like what Adam has been talking about in this thread. Its a really simple idea, reduce the number of streams except for the best of the best and give them good service because they will have a lot less streamers to take care of. The automated rebroadcasting and possibly auto uploading to youtube alone makes it very cool. The monetization sounds interesting on how much they can compete with twitch so I wonder what the comparison would be.
So my question is most of the bigger streamers have exclusivity deals with twitch, how do you expect to get them out of those deals? Do you plan on directly sponsoring teams like EG for instance to give them more incentive to jump ship? If they do have multiple players on a team and the entire team joins MLG.tv will you have an EG tv thing where you can watch any of their players playing SC2 or Dota2...etc as a meta rebroadcast style thing? In that case do the ad timings get saved to the rebroadcast and played during those too? Do the players get more revenue from the rebroadcast views?
And last question and this is really important I think. What content creation features will you guys give to use the platform. Like will you have a streaming client for broadcasters that has some integration? Like do you have extra features to offer from a broadcaster standpoint that could be integrated there? Personally one of my pet peeves with twitch is you have to have the dashboard open to run ads and as well as that have obs in the background so instead of having 2 pages needing to be open you could have the chat and the ad button in obs maybe.
How will streaming to the service work? Same as always, or does MLG have more streamlined capture process? Ease of use and manner of capture are two huge areas of complaint that seemingly no one is looking to solve.
EPT
