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.

[magnets]

The Blue Alliance provides, hands down, the best way to watch webcasts. However, work still needs to be done to make the webcasts consistent. It would be much easier if all webcasts were done with the same streaming service, like Twitch, which seems to work really well for FRC streaming. It is incredibly frustrating to have to open all these liveStrem windows to watch different regionals, then have to put up with different FRC webcast sites fighting with eachother.

[coalhot]

Originally Posted by Zach O

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.

This. 1000X this.

Also, on my little 13" laptop, I'm not going to go use up all my screen space to have TBA, WFN, and Red Alliance open when I want to watch stuff. I'll have TBA open with a few streams, and that's it.

[cadandcookies]

I agree 100%. There's a bigger picture here than page views and RCAs.

Because of game day, this year I got to introduce some of our seniors to watching and keeping up with other events-- last Saturday, I walked in on our build crew taking a break from working on the robot to eat popcorn and watch Howell District event. Unrestricted, public streams are quickly helping my (and, I believe, other teams) realize exactly how global the competition is-- I doubt that many of our students would have been able to name even four regionals that we don't attend, but now they're sourcing improvements to our practice robot from watching teams in California, Michigan, and the east coast.

I'm not a developer, and my team doesn't run any streams, but there are huge benefits for letting anyone (whether it's TBA or WatchFIRSTNow, or some other site I haven't heard about) aggregate streams. Compared to the disadvantages (page views? ad pennies?), it doesn't seem like much of an argument.

FIRST is built on those funny words: "coopertition," and "gracious professionalism." Compete if you want to, but it's a long shot to say that exclusive webcasts help anyone in FIRST.

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Zach O

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.

This exactly. The community has built some great tools that make webcasts a much simpler experience. Let's try and work together and iterate what we have to make it all even better.

And seriously, the fact that TBA is open source is great. If there's an idea you have, a feature you want, a service you want integrated, or literally anything else, just post about it, submit an issue, or fork the repo and submit a pull request. For every cool thing you can do by yourself, we as a community can do a thousand times better as a group.

[blockhead]

I agree with this 100%... Over the four years I was on my team I was not very fortunate to be able to travel with them to competitions (as often as I wanted to). The ability to watch the live stream is vital for each team because they have parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles even sponsors that want to see how your team is doing.

This is one of the reasons why I made At The Control... I really didn't need a place that I could watch multiple feeds at once, I wanted one place that had all of my team data and live stream. (don't get me wrong TBA and GameDay are great applications) Unfortunately such sites did not exist. So I made At The Control while on my third year of the team. (Mind you I had no clue how to build a website my freshman year)

I am a number kind of guy, I love knowing how many people use my site, seeing how they interact with features, with each other. (I wouldn't use these numbers to my advantage either) Because the site really caters towards team specific followers I do end up getting allot of visits from parents back home. On Saturday I was running through the chat log and was just seeing how things were going and I noticed something and it immediately threw red flag...

The issue crosses a line where my work starts getting criticized and bashed because some regionals or third party streaming services will not allow other domains to embed feeds. This wasn't the first time it happened and in the case that the stream is not allowed to be embedded I post a message where the video would display that reads, "We apologize but the streaming provider dose not allow us to user their feed" it continues with a link to the video. But regardless of that it still happens. I get this is a completely separate issue however it can be solved by the push of a button and every one would be happy.