As I suggested a few days ago, I will not be having my competitive Tetris live stream today, nor will I have it next week Friday, because of my spring break. Even though I’m not actually going anywhere on vacation, I would still like to take a vacation from my normal responsibilities in order to relax for a little bit.

Because I’m not streaming today, I decided to instead address two frequent questions about my stream.

I’ll start off with the first one, which includes all questions regarding how I stream, what software I use, and how I manage to make it look so professional, even though I haven’t been streaming for very long.

To get the simple quesions out of the way, the only software I use for actually streaming is XSplit. In the background, I have Tetris Arena open on Google Chrome, a bunch of other pages open on Firefox, and Skype up and running so my co-caster can make it into the stream. It might seem a little strange that I’m able to macromanage all of this at once, but it’s actually somewhat easy for me because I have a conveniently large 17.3″ widescreen laptop. Thus, I can have programs open in the section of my moni­tor that is not shown on the stream, which keeps things uncluttered for the viewers and gives me convenient access to useful tools.

As for the professionalism of my stream, all the scenes and transitions seem clean and aesthetially appealing because XSplit offers a feature where I can switch from one set-up to another with an easy press of a hotkey combination. As for the actual graphics, I spent a little bit of time creating those my­self in Photoshop. It takes a little bit of intuition and a good fundamental understanding of geometric graphic design to get the overlays to match up well (or, if you’re unskilled, just spend tons of time doing trial-and-error and you’ll figure it out eventually).

If you were curious about the facet of professionalism in the sense that I was able to literally come out of almost nowhere and become a skilled streamer, it’s because I didn’t really actually come out of almost nowhere. Even though I wasn’t known to be a streamer at all before my debut during my pilot broadcast a few weeks ago, I was still working behind the scenes on behalf of other people with projects that in­volve streaming and eSports casting. As you might have already guessed, I have a lot of background experience when it comes to multimedia production of pretty much all different types, and that ex­pe­ri­ence I built up helped me jump to success.

And now, we’ll move on to the second frequently asked question, which was more commonly asked by my closer supporters who were curious as to a slight discrepancy they noticed about how I’m promoting the stream.

If you’ve been keeping up with my website and looking at the stream recaps I’ve been posting as blog entries, you might notice that I always post them in the form of Twitch.TV replays, rather than YouTube videos. Only recently did I start posting YouTube versions of the replays of the streams, and this was only because there were people having trouble accessing the Twitch.TV replays.

Those supporters who are closer to me know that I’m all about taking advantage of opportunities and max­imizing rewards. To them, it seemed strange that I wasn’t immediately uploading these replays to Youtube and advertising them there, as, because I monetize my videos on YouTube, I would be re­ceiving direct benefit from all my views.

No, this is not something that I simply overlooked – if I was so unalert that I overlooked things as obvious as this, I would probably not be as relatively successful as I am today. The real reason I am sticking with promoting Twitch.TV replays is because of a long-term goal that I would like to achieve.

Similar to YouTube partnership, Twitch.TV has a partnership program where they offer their streamers portions of the advertising revenue they earn. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that people can get from one hit video like on YouTube. For those who are unfamiliar with YouTube’s monetization program, and for those who have not yet been fortunate to have a decently popular video on YouTube: if you upload a video that gains a good influx of views and attention, YouTube will invite you to monetize that video, no matter what the condition of your other videos. So, for example, if you have 100 videos that have 5-10 views each, but one video turns out to be a great success and gets 5,000 views on the first day you upload it, YouTube will send you a notification saying that you are eligible to make money off of that video.

On the other hand, with Twitch.TV, streamers must be well-rounded and have consistent success with their live broadcasts, and the standards for what Twitch.TV considers successful isn’t negligible. Some of the qualifications include concurrent viewers during streams, but other qualifications include view counts on stream re­plays.

I think by now, it’s clear as to why I’m promoting the Twitch.TV replays. I’m confident that, because of how unique Hard Drop is in the sense that there are not very many competitive Tetris communities out there right now, and because of how massive Hard Drop is relative to other competitive Tetris com­mu­nities, we have a good shot at becoming a Twitch.TV partner. The only thing left now is to work our way up the popularity ladder.

So, bringing this all to a full-circle close, here’s my greedy personality shining through once again that my long-term supporters have come to know me for – I feel that, by taking a sacrifice now and not uploading replays to YouTube, and instead collecting all these views on Twitch.TV, it will help us get partnership in the long-run. Once we get partnership, I feel it will be well worth it, far more worth it than getting a small immediate monetary reward for my efforts.

I think this will be a good place to end this blog post. I most likely will not be updating my blog fre­quently throughout my spring break, but I will post a relatively large update towards the end of break covering things that I did.