Twitch Drama

Twitch Drama refers to the differing opinions regarding the move to Twitch.tv for streaming alongside or in place of SgtMuffin's content delivery network.

Backstory

Way back in like 2008/2009 Justin.tv became a popular streaming site for people who wanted to stream their lives/pornography/copyrighted movies. Brian used Justin.tv (among other services) to stream shows like BBLiveShow, NSFW and other random shit. It was decent. I think they started injecting ads into the streams at one point and I think the stream delay got pretty bad too. Because of these issues we moved on to sites like Dailymotion (yeah, they did livestreaming for a bit) and MetaCDN.

A while into Justin.tv's life, they created a gaming-focused offshoot called Twitch.tv. Twitch is all about streaming video games and literally nothing else. Twitch quickly became much bigger than Justin.tv and they just shut down Justin.tv. It was a bummer, but I'm fairly sure the Diamond Club had moved away from Justin.tv way before they shut down.

At this point, Twitch became mega-huge and got bought by Amazon. DiamondClub has a ton of friends that are big on Twitch, but as far as the big DiamondClub shows go (Night Attack, Cordkillers, Weird Things etc.) Twitch wasn't that big of a deal since they didn't allow talk shows.

Talk Shows and IRL

On December 16, 2016 Twitch opened their doors to "Talk Shows" and "IRL" (i.e. just people doing shit on a live stream). That meant that all the Diamond Club podcasts could now stream on Twitch. Excited about this news, Justin took to Twitter to announce that all their shows would now be streamed on Twitch. There was some backlash on Twitter with a lot of Diamond Club regulars not happy with this move toward Twitch and what they felt was a move away from DiamondClub.tv. SgtMuffin wrote up a big post detailing his feelings on the issue.

Justin did his best to reassure everyone that DiamondClub.tv was not dead/dying, and that we will always be streaming on DCTV. It got a little unclear if he meant that all the shows would be streamed to both Twitch and SgtMuffin's CDN, or if some shows would just use one or the other.

Diamond Club's First Twitch Streams

On the Sunday after the Talk Show and IRL channels were opened, Weird Things was streamed to both Twitch and SgtMuffin's CDN. Neshcom worked out a solution where both the Twitch chat and the Diamond Club chat were fed into one single chatroom that was displayed on the stream. It seemed to work well and I didn't see many (if any) people complaining.

On the following Tuesday, Night Attack was streamed to both Twitch and SgtMuffin's CDN, however this time the Twitch feed was set as the default video on DiamondClub.tv and ONLY the Twitch chat was shown on screen. Since the standard SgtMuffin CDN stream wasn't up on any of the channels on DiamondClub.tv the only way you could view it was if you had the direct link to the stream. Because of this, most people assumed that they were ONLY streaming to Twitch. I didn't really pay attention to the Twitch chat during the show, but there looked to be a healthy amount of people in there. The Diamond Club chat was full of a lot of upset people however. It was a real bummer.

On the show, Justin reiterated that this was just a test to see how Twitch streaming would work for our shows. Though, Brian kinda muddied the message with talk about how this was our homecoming after years of exile after Justin.tv kicked us out. (Night Attack being unorganized and without a unified vision for the future of the show? NOW I'VE HEARD EVERYTHING!)

I'm writing this just after the inaugural Night Attack on Twitch (December 20, 2016) and they have not talked publicly about how they thought the experiment went. The only things they said were during the aftershow and that they had 300-400 viewers throughout the show. This had them at the fifth most popular "Talk Show" broadcast on Twitch. Are they gonna keep doing Twitch-first streams? Who knows!?

So What's Everyone Saying About This?

I'm not even gonna pretend like I don't have very strong opinions about this issue, but I'll summarize the pros and cons that people have stated and I'll try to be as fair to both sides as possible.

Yo Dog, Twitch is Cool!

• There's a much larger pool of viewers with whom we can build an audience
• We've been doing internet talk shows for years, this is a good opportunity to get an early lead in the Talk Shows section of Twitch
• Why shouldn't we just stream to as many different places as possible?
• Better chat/modding tools

Twitch Fuggin' SUX

• We're proud of what the community has built at DiamondClub.tv and it feels like Brian and Justin are just tossing it aside in favor of a big shiny thing
• The delay on Twitch streams is about 12 seconds (about twice as bad as DCTV)
• Having multiple chatrooms is super inconvenient
• No "Low" or "Medium" quality streams unless you're a partner
• Partnering with Twitch means you can't simulcast to other sites (somebody check this, I've been getting conflicting reports)
• We have less (read: "zero") control over Twitch.tv as a platform
• Copyright bullshit
• Twitch has content guidelines
• Twitch culture (chat emotes and notifications for follows/subs/hosts) can be annoying
• There's literally nothing wrong with our current streaming solution