Kickoff is Coming
by Collin Fultz, Senior Director, FIRST Robotics Competition • December 04, 2024
The Kickoff of REEFSCAPESM presented by Haas is just one month away!
Kickoff weekend begins with the FIRST ® Founder’s Reception on Friday, January 3, 2025. Each team can send 2 mentors to the event. Attendees can RSVP through the FIRST Dashboard. Registration for the event closes at Noon eastern on Thursday, December 12, 2024.
The official Kickoff broadcast will begin at Noon eastern time on Saturday, January 4, 2025. Just like in prior seasons, there will be some pre-broadcast content so that you can check your connection and audio/video set up. New this season, the Kickoff is being broadcast using the Premiere feature on the FIRST ® Robotics Competition YouTube channel. Teams can opt-in to receive an email reminder approximately 1 hour before the broadcast by filling out the form on the Kickoff webpage. You can also subscribe to our YouTube Channel for a notification when we go live.
The broadcast will last approximately one hour. The Field Tour Videos will be shown as part of the broadcast and available on the FIRST Robotics Competition YouTube channel following Kickoff.
An encrypted version of the game manual will be posted closer to Kickoff. A decrypted version will be available via the Season Materials page after the Kickoff broadcast. CAD files and drawings of the field, drawings of the team version of field items, the Field Tour Videos, and more will be available on the Playing Field Assets page. Information on the KitBot will be available on the KitBot resources page.
Does this mean actual game reveal starts at 12 EST?
I think they do some footage before the broadcast around 15 minutes before? Pretty sure that’s what they mean by that.
I know there’s always stuff before the broadcast. I am just wondering when the actual game reveal happens because we have students who are in a conflicting club that also has an important Saturday activity and we need to work with their club adviser on an agreed upon time when they can leave there and come to robotics.
Somewhere in the 12:15-12:30 time is when the game is typically revealed however there is no definitive time
Wonder if kickoff moving to YouTube over twitch is indicative of a move for event livestreams?
Thats what I’m hoping for personally.
Such a great change, every year hosting kickoff is 10x more stressful trying to work with our district to unblock twitch for the day. Glad to be done with that!
-Mike
I’m hoping you’re right. I’m worried that since FIRST has direct control of the Kickoff broadcast and it’s output source, they can pick and choose where it goes cuz it’s their stream. Might not hold true for district and regional event streams. They might have their own system in place that only works with Twitch still.
It could also be broadcast simultaneously to both Twitch and YouTube with a restreaming service or using the multi-rtmp-plugin for tools like obs. Using a third party restreaming service would let them pick one source locally and the service handles duplicating the stream to your output points. The plugin you are doubling/tripling/ and so on, the amount of bandwidth needed to upload for each extra outgoing stream. Depending on what network setup is available at the local events this might not be ideal.
Even worse. Top of the hour 3 minute ad breaks.
FIRST’s biggest concern is still music copyright on streams with moving over to YouTube + JK productions being able to run their splicer for instantly upload matches which is configured for Twitch. Unless they opt to go a route where licensed/allow-listed music is used for the stream while keeping a more traditional house playlist going I doubt they will make the change (This is what FUN does for many of it’s streams).
If they do FIRST has a couple options: The safe route would be to create a couple dozen YouTube channels like they did for Twitch in case one account is taken down. They could also opt to run many streams through the same YouTube account at once (which is what we have done) if they want it centralized but run the risk of a live stream ban/takedown.
Youtube fell off hard
I believe they are talking about Twitch. This is one of the many reasons FUN went over to YouTube. On YouTube I can disable YouTube mid-roll ads from appearing on our live streams which prevents interruptions to shows/matches.
Okay Hasan. 10/10
I honestly like Twitch better but the issues is that all of the FirstInspires channels have the setting to archive previous live streams turned off for some reason so you can’t go back and see any content from the past. Even if it was only kept for a week or two, which I think is what non-partnered channels have access to, that would be great and allow for reviewing matches after you play.
Don’t Twitch streamers also have complete control over when ads are run? I don’t really understand the difference you’re referring to there.
Don’t see the option you are referring to for complete control. We have our ads set to the lowest threshold. This is what our ads manager as a Twitch Partner looks like:
You can disable pre-roll ads by running mid-roll ads. So theoretically, for each FIRST stream the webcast operator could press a button to run a mid-roll ad during a match break I guess. I could be mistaken as we only use Twitch for a few streams per year now and is not our primary focus.
https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/disabling-prerolls?language=en_US
Such a hassle when we can’t watch Twitch streams on school wifi.
All we need now is the regionals to be on youtube