Webcast Issues

[Zach O]

As a member of the developer community, I'm pretty frustrated with the events going on concerning webcasts. Specifically the issue where streamers use methods of disallowing other websites (whether it be Gameday, WFN, Red Alliance, At The Control, etc etc) to embed their streams.

It was my understanding that previously in the community, teams or individuals ran streams as a service to the community. One website or group can't have someone at EVERY event going on in a weekend. If there's a situation where multiple websites want to provide streams, it wouldn't make sense to have multiple people hosting a webcast at an event. This seems pretty obvious.

So, teams and individuals in the community stepped up to the challenge! A few people here and a few people there decided they would undertake the challenge of hosting webcasts in their area. And before you know it, coverage for these events started to grow.

And then, we had a problem. There's a ton of webcasts going on all over the Internet. How do I find them all? So developers put together some terrific services, free to the community, to aggregate all these webcasts together in to one place. And things were good, for a while.

And now petty pageviews are getting in the way of these awesome services. If stream providers make the decision to block websites from embedding their stream, that's within their right. And the websites have no choice but to respect that. But I can still be mad about it.

If these streamers are relying on ads to support their webcast and offset their cost (trust me - I understand expensive web services), and their reasoning for blocking embedding is to direct traffic to their website to serve their Google Adsense ads (it's 2014 - who's not using AdBlock anyways) so they can earn pennies for an entire weekend, this is a terrible, invalid reasoning. Streaming sites like Twitch allow you to play video ads on your stream (yes - they'll play in the embedded videos too!) when you choose to play them. The FIRST In Michigan stream chooses not to run ads on their streams, although if they wanted to they'd probably choose to run ads inbetween matches during the Cha-Cha Slide breaks.

Maybe people are doing it for the exposure? Who would know that you worked hard to set up a webcast this weekend if people aren't going to your channel to watch your stream? (this is a fallacy - mad props to the Citrus Circuits for the cool custom overlay they've made for webcasts. Let's hope FIRST works on getting real time scoring to these sorts of things) However, if the endgame is getting more views, you're shooting yourself in the foot. If your stream isn't on Gameday, I'm not watching it. Digging through Chief to find links to webcasts is a thing of the past.

Or maybe they're doing it for the page views? Because at the end of the day they hope having a few more page views will make their numbers sound better for Chairmans? Or if they have more traffic than someone else they've "won" the nonexistent (at least for us) streaming war?

I didn't make Megaphone, and I will never make a service in the FRC community, strictly to get some numbers to impress people. I, and other developers in the community (for the most part), make things for the community because it benefits the community. I'll never stop someone from signing up for my web service because I can't make money on them. The Blue Alliance doesn't block specific developers from using their API because they're making a competing website (although can we stop with the TBA clones? We've got one that works pretty well and it's open source). My mother doesn't care that she can't watch a webcast because of petty politics within the community.

FIRST preaches supporting other teams and coopertition and all the other buzzwords I failed to memorize. So why is it that, when it comes to webcasts, some are looking out for themselves instead of what's best for the community? How about we start putting these politics aside and focus on creating a culture of making cool things for the right reasons.

There's also some political issues with the archiving situation, but I'm too close to the situation to make a comment.