Elements of streaming – How streamers are building their content and why you should care

[Music] [Music] all right nice to see so many of you here today I'll be talking about streaming which is not denser the eSports so don't be afraid as I was introduced as a researcher and that is truly what I am I'm a researcher and scientist at the University of Tampa so I do mainly research and streaming and eSports so the type of trimming we kind of research video is media psychology so we study how and why people consume content media games so on and today I'll

be talking about streaming and how streamers build their content so hopefully for those of you who know almost nothing about streaming you'll leave this room knowing a bit more hopefully and for those of you who are reversed in the kind of streaming culture I'll try to go more in depth and hopefully you get some insights that you can use in your own development or own companies so why are within doing this research and streaming well simple answer that question is that streaming is really really huge this is just like some figures from a few years ago was kind of when I got into like the last of kind of official figures they're a bit more more secretive these days but it's it's grown hugely and I'd like to say that streaming and eSports or growing hand-in-hand it's it's hard not to see people talk about eSports in mainstream media these day and now it's so big and it's like a new thing and I think they

both can feed off each other and streaming is a big reason why eSports also big and vice versa of course you can't forget about YouTube as well so this just shows kind of how popular twitches and of course there's many other services but I'm going to talk about today is this study waited on Twitch so what we wanted to do is see how people are building our content sure people are playing games that's kind of the assumption here but what are the adding on top of the game I mean we've we who research our also avid Stream waters ourselves so we kind of know what's going on but to actually kind of put it down into actual numbers so we looked at popular streamers Ridiculist of like the 500 most popular twitch streamers and then we started going through them and we cut away everything that was not in English because we for example don't

speak Chinese or Korean and then we only took kind of individual broadcasters so we skipped out the big ESL and riot streams are very much more like traditional sports broadcast than they are actual kind of individual streams as we see it so we ended up looking at about a hundred streams and just for those interest in the demographics here about 85 percent were male and the rest were either Asian female or than kind of male/female koper so we looked at the video and then with the profile and I'll go into those in more detail here later but so if anyone here doesn't know what a game on Twitch looks like this is an example this is bjergsen playing League of Legends so you can see that the majority if you have this in fullscreen majority will be the actual game being

played and if you just quickly try to look at this and try to see kind of other stuff going on so I mean this next one I've kind of highlighted different things so these are all kind of additions to the game these are texts or images or video or other stuff that he has chosen to put on this game view and we can see that a lot of this is not very kind of high-tech it's not super super polished this is just like basic text in a few places kind of sponsorship placement and a video down there and even if you look at the video it's not it looks kind of amateurish if you see kind of all the clutter in the background and then kind of this pay of office sliding I mean probably could be done better and if you look at other youtubers you see kind of a really high production standard and of course that's also present on Twitch people are using green screens and so on but anyway try to keep this in mind when

we look at these elements and I'm going to show another game later and I think it's important thing about the games in comparison to each other but in any case I'm going to present the next six most popular things that we found on on the streams apparently the percentage marks are not working what anyway all of the ones we we looked at use the microphone and I think that's because become kind of the to go to communicative way if you are a streamer so basically everyone who streams and is successful is using a microphone to communicate with their viewers that's of course quite natural because you're playing game your hands are tied you can't kind of chat at the same time or it's not very easy at least so but you're not using your voice for anything when you're playing except for screaming at your teammates in voice comms so you can talk to your viewers and you can still read you can both

watch the game and read a chat that's why a lot of people using two or three monitors and still answer them via microphone and to make it kind more personal the majority of people using webcams not everyone which was kind of surprising because because that's kind of something I associated with all the and a big big if streamers is having a camera I think it's important here to kind of realize that a big reason why people are watching streams are the people they're not just watching game being played by some anonymous but they're watching that same person because a lot of popular streamers are these so-called variety streamers so they can play a different game from day to day so the cameras they're kind of help to build a person brand same as how important the YouTube it is for those popular tubers to have like a strong personal brand and then the third most

popular was this type of notifications these are often kind of pop-ups usually kind of some some gave and text and then something that that tells other people watching the stream that someone has done something great so usually it's it's a viewer who chooses to subscribe or donate some money or follow the stream so basically what the streamer is doing is recognizing the spectators that choose to help them out often monetarily and when we've done previous research on what people watch streams from the consumer side we found that like the one of the main reasons where people subscribe and choose to spend money is this these social factors so people want to be part of the social sphere and can't belong and then be part of that streaming community so this notification ties quite well into that and a lot of streamers are realized that if you're not recognizing your subscribers your followers your donators people are not

going to keep on doing it and that's what you want to get that generates money as a streamer more ways to earn money is sponsorships we in the previous one we saw this one sponsor banner for merchandise inside a lot of the big eSports names are selling merchandise or sponsored by other companies and then they have this sponsor binary somewhere up on the streaming video other way also to recognize your viewers is this kind of static subscriber donation information so it often says like ladies subscriber and then whenever someone subscribes it updates or then it can have for example monthly the biggest donation this month which then cans for other type of interesting behavior because if you if you watch watch streams you probably sometimes seeing these kind of donation wars they're often called so it's person a first donates $10 and you shown us the for example daily top donator

then another person coming comes in and donates $15 and then they go back and forth kind of battling it out of who will be the kind of most proficient donator for that day and that can really expand that then often the streamer kind of keep that going by by by addressing these people directly and then trying to get them you know to one-up the other and that's a very interesting behavioral aspect of this kind of live streaming something you can't really do on let's say YouTube and then plus the social media links often like it will be just a URL to their YouTube video channel or something because you can't really have lean clickable links on the video and this is interesting on watch the profile page in a bit considering these days how important social media is it's quite surprising to see such a low account there but anyway this is the actual video which is the kind of core of it

and then if you look at the browser then below video is kind of bone profile page where the people can list whatever they want basically true general HTML this is quick look like there's a lot of text you don't have to read everything but just kind of pointing it out that you can see here is this person it looks quite you know produced since all the kind of black bread white banners are the same style so someone's done the graphics and there's a lot of information and then there is call to actions donations support the stream and then kind of this sleek daddy clubs subscribe so as you can see here there are a lot of kind of call to actions here and they're placed at the top quite handily so we looked at these as well because they're also an integral part especially like when you're talking about are really invested streaming community not people who just go and watch the video for like one minute and

then they can move on to the next one but people couldn't stay and come back day to day so the three most used thing were social media everyone had this everyone had either one or multiple links so compare that to the video where it was only a fraction two people who had links like everyone was linking to some other service I think the most common ones are almost ever had a Twitter everyone had YouTube often they have a Facebook kind of pages same as an athlete or sports team or something like that the company would have also instagrams you can build this larger and a personal following and I think in general streamers are using this kind of multi media multi-channel communication to build a personal brand and also to generate revenue not just on on Twitch when you're streaming but also you know they produce highlight videos they put

on YouTube every day and many big streamers get like 100 200 thousand views per per video they put up every day and that's a significant amount of money they receive from ads so it's an important part in keeping their kind of personal band running people often ask for donations there are a few people who explicitly say that they don't want they're not selling out they don't want people to give them money what other people are communicating in a way that hey this will keeps me running if you like my content you should donate often some phrases that it's a tip because in some jurisdictions you can't say it's a donation unless you're a charity but other people are have this kind of tip jar where you give via PayPal or something else and often these then end up as notifications on the stream and all the people had sponsors as well as I

mentioned a lot of eSports names sell personalized merchandise or merchandise tied to their team and a lot of computer component sponsors I even saw like one or two medical marijuana sponsorships on on streeting which is surprising and again kind of a potential gray area as far as the law goes which also on twitch can be interesting because a streamer has to adhere to vote local law and then I also the twitch terms so and they've been changed multiple times for example they're very strict on even partial nudity you can't stream without a shirt for example because they've been in trouble because of that but if you remember that League of Legends slide from earlier that was quite kind of a well I atleast got the feeling that a lot of the text was put there quite like hastily and it didn't look so produced whereas here in the next slide it's not

our game is hearthstone and here we can again see at the bottom there's a sponsor and here's webcam and then there's these static subscription things there in the bottom and then social media links and I think as a game developer it's its conclusions understand that when people are streaming what type of content they produce and also a cow that content ties into how the game is how the game looks so I think hearthstone is a good example of enabling streamers really well because there's all this dead space on the board basically all this on the side is not essential for the game at all whereas if you compared to League of Legends there's like the fullscreen there's things happening all over the screen there's a lot of real estate already spent on you know the player mana HP the teammates and whatever that kind of UI in tournaments so when you

have like again it's more simpler has more space than the streamer has higher your freedom of what they actually want to do with that space and that leads me to the final part of this presentation which is tips for developers so I think number one is is realizing this screen real estate I think it's going to be more and more important in the future even that the streamers are going to integrate different things potentially like dynamic things on Twitch which already has a few dynamic things for example there for hearthstone they have this this in decklist thing where you can hover over over certain card and it shows what the card does which is really great for people who are not familiar with all the cards because in the game itself they're just showing the artwork and not the actual text of it and forgetting is quite information intensive that's really good for the viewers but those type of interactive

elements can potentially pop up also in eSports to think about displaying statistics or so on so like actually leaving some space in your game can be a good thing not just like playing it all out on the screen but leaving some kind of dead zones where you can actually afford to put stuff without it being hindrance and then device neutral that might be a bad term but when we looked at these these things these affordances as you call them almost none of them were exclusively desktop or mobile because basically you can you the video you access is the same no matter if you're watching on PC or mobile and then the profile page can also be accessed on mobile even though it's a bit like it's you have to go into menu to see it so probably the mobile users don't don't look at it that often however worth noting is if you're for simple sponsoring a stream and you want your banner there if if it's a gain of

people watch on mobile a lot of twitch viewership is on mobile you have to realise that the screen size if you have our intricate banner with small text it's not going to look very good on mobile of course this is true for all types of graphics on mobile devices so but something worth noting and then I think important thing in general for creating engaging games and content vote for twitch and YouTube is is having a game that helps engage both the streamer which are game and the streamer and the audience with your game as with you trial and error kind of things of trying to incorporate twitch API with the game so that chat could impact how the game goes but just kind of simply having having a some kind of downtime and again can be good because then the streamer can can talk with the chat for example in taipa loading screen can be a good time for the streamer to you know take

donations take subscriptions some for some League of Legends players often can do it after the game because they might be so into the game was going on they missed all the donations so they're native to them in one swoop after the game is that something that can be kept in mind kind of when you're doing a game a loading screen it's not necessarily a bad thing it might be good to have the tablet break between the portions in the game so the streamer can actually get some of this stuff done hopefully this showed you something of the stuff that's going on on Twitch I have a lot more data from our observations but as time is limited you can't talk about them all but if you wanna ask about it come find me afterwards to send an email or [Music]

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