cool!!! my experience with broadcasting began at eudemonia (the game store i used to work at, in berkeley). i started some of the first starcraft watching parties in the US for the korean-based gsl shortly after starcraft ii came out, and a starcraft i streamer named moletrap drove down from sacramento for the party, and shoutcasted an OSL (starcraft i) tournament that was scheduled to happen right after the GSL final. back then, we used livestream or ustream. then i heard about justin.tv from my friend sarah, who remembers “that weird guy named justin who went to all the sf tech meetups with a camera mounted to his forehead saying he was streaming his life and this was going to be a thing.” then that became twitch, and they were still trying to make justin.tv the “main” thing. then twitch became the main thing. because of the starcraft watching parties, i became friends with some sf bay area starcraft ii personalities, and was a moderator on some of their channels for a while. we’d have like 6 people watching at a time.
then early on in twitch, they tried having famous people be twitch brand ambassadors. the first was whitera. i’m a protoss player, like whitera is, so i enthusiastically went to twitch’s first event, held at their sf office, where they hosted whitera for a meet-n-greet with fans. i wore my team liquid shirt (that anyone can buy from their store), which was funny because people asked each other, “is that liquid`judy?” to which i had to respond emphatically that no i was not part of team liquid at all, i’m just a fan who bought the shirt. it’s light blue with darker blue logo. i actually love and still have that shirt. anyway at the end of the meet-n-greet, whitera agreed to 2v1 me and another fan. he killed us within the first couple of minutes using dark templars. as we gged out, he turned to me IRL and said “next time, make observers.” it was good advice. i have always been and will always be very bad at starcraft. but now i’m a little better because whitera.
then i didn’t stream or watch anything for many years.
now i play world of warcraft classic. one of our guildmates streams our raids sometimes. and because i’m playing WoW classic with people who are up to 20 years younger than me, i’m now being exposed to what i think of as “their” internet culture, and learning about :kek_w: (apparently for some reason unknown to me, _w is a common suffix for twitch emotes) and “press F for your fallen comrades” and whatnot. it’s very overwhelming and i feel fucking old.
my favorite author of recent times, n.k.jemisin, sometimes streams metal gear solid or other first-person shooters. Twitch
that’s some of what i think of streaming! lol. besides that, there’s just “i lived in SF for 9 years and got very immersed in the culture” stuff, like hanging around startup people and being at a wedding where my boyfriend at the time was the best man of the groom who was his intern at apple like a decade prior to that and was now founder of a thing where all the wedding guests were joking about livestreaming the wedding on periscope’s early beta app because a bunch of the guests were founding periscope at the time. completely separately from that shit, i have some friends who livestream themselves writing code sometimes. i see their posts scroll by on facebook once in a while, but i haven’t really watched in earnest.
my friend sarah made a lot of things in her career. one of them that she talks about ruefully as terrible now (lol) was flash media server during the 2nd time she wound up at adobe because of acquisitions. but because of that experience, she knows about video, streaming media, and internet stuff. i am saying it vaguely because i don’t know what i’m talking about. when she talks about it, it is not vague like this. lol. something about p2p video and sockets and embedded somethings? i don’t know. anyway she is interested in web rtc? maybe that’s a thing? as a way to do video that is not through youtube/google?
anyway i’m going to ask her about lbry, too.
fuuko! i see that you are still playing mega man 2, as recently as … YESTERDAY! awesome, i hope i catch you live soon!!!