Ninja Streams Everywhere

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The next thing to talk about with @Ninja's "streaming everywhere" experiment is audience engagement. 🧵

One of the reasons audiences look for smaller streamers is because they're better at engagement. When every (or at least most) chat messages are acknowledged by the streamer, it makes everybody feel included.

Alerts on stream give viewers agency to draw attention to themselves and goals (follows, donations, sub points, etc) create a sense of community. This is what adds up and makes streaming so amazing: audience engagement. No other digital medium matches up.

The thing is, this doesn't scale. When you've got 50-100 people in chat, you might be able to keep up. When you've got any more than that, it becomes too much. With ~21,000 viewers? There's no chance.

@Ninja has actually removed any semblance of chat or alerts from his stream. He only shows the game and his face. He does acknowledge the high level alerts (subscriptions and donations) verbally, but that's about it.

Even still, @Ninja reported having serious difficulties keeping up with chat during his multi-cast. While he was "only" streaming to 21,000 people on Twitch, he was also streaming to thousands (or tens of thousands) on all of his other platforms. dotesports.com/streaming/news/ninja-struggles-to-keep-up-with-chats-during-multi-platform-stream-experiment

Instead of merging his chats, he was trying to keep up with each of them individually. When that didn't work, he switched gears and just focused on the chat from one platform. He left all of the other chats derelict. 😬

His viewership still only went up because everybody knew this was just a test, but this could be the death stroke for a smaller streamer. Not attending to chat means people leave, and people leaving en masse is how your channel(s) fade into obscurity.

SO, here's what I would suggest: If you're going to multicast, make sure your chats are merged. Make sure that you can see all of the messages on all of your platforms in chronological order, and make sure you know which platform a message is from.

Once you get too many chatters across platforms, this is still going to be an issue... you'er going to need mods. Your moderators can monitor chat and pick out the important things. Questions, novel comments, etc. You need a system for your mods to funnel those things to you.

Once this is in place, you should be able to handle multicasting. You'll need more mods as you grow, but that has always been the case.

Now, I've pitched a pretty significant thing. Restream merges some streaming chats, but not all. Maybe there are other tools that can do it, but I'm not familiar with any.

But before you even go down the road of trying to figure out how to accomplish all of this, you might want to check out my next thread on whether or not you should even try multicasting...

BTW, make sure to check out my previous thread about the technical hurdles of setting up this whole thing. twitter.com/TrezyCodes/status/1570789710209093635?s=20&t=2qv1VoZNvngfeAD34fzvVw