deadmau5 Talks Twitch and the Richard Devine of Streaming
Who are some ground-breaking Twitch content creators and users doing influencer marketing today, and what exactly are they up to that makes them stand out? Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, Chair, Streaming Media Conferences, and CMO, id3as, says to deadmau5, DJ & musician, equity partner, Stream Voodoo, that even ten years ago, consumers of live music streams were more likely to put up with technical issues such as buffering due to the sheer novelty of the experience. But these days users have little tolerance for any glitches.
Deadmau5 agrees and says that today, “You drop a frame, you drop 20 people.”
Schumacher-Rasmussen notes that after the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, the entire streaming industry had to quickly deal with lingering technical issues to ensure that a suddenly huge new audience would stay tuned to live streams. However, he wonders if things are still not completely efficient. “What are the biggest challenges that you have faced in delivering your streams the way you want to deliver them?” he asks deadmau5. ”Are they mostly technological?”
“Yeah, a hundred percent,” deadmau5 says. But he notes that presenting glitch-free streams is nowhere near enough to stand out these days. “Sure, I could sit in this chair, and I can pop open a few computers in front of me and jam out,” he says. “But then the one interesting thing would be…a multi-cam…a switcher, and I'm like, okay, that gets boring after five minutes.” He highlights Twitch as a platform where he’s found content creators presenting what they stream in much more innovative ways. “I’m not a big fan of Twitch,” he admits. “Not their company, not their tech, but it works, and it’s fine. But I go through it, and I look at who's innovating, who's got this really great setup for control, where they don't have an operator, and they've got autonomous systems all running on their own, they've got their own follow cams, it's switchers all this various stuff in there.”
Deadmau5 brings up a couple of major Twitch innovators he has discovered. “There's this guy called The Sushi Dragon,” he says. “And this kid is, you’ve got to look him up, he is mentally insane, he's definitely certifiable, but he's got this warehouse out in the middle of Montana and just every new gadget, every new little handheld toy, every kind of IP camera or follow camera robot. He's just built this huge playpen. And he does live editing, live streaming. And he uses peripheral technology and software technology like TouchDesigner and all this stuff to really do these great live edits, and he works on mobile packs and all this stuff. So he's like Richard Devine of the streaming world. He is just got like every little doodad and gadget and stuff like that.”
“Then there are these other guys, like SOA. He’s a musician,” deadmau5 says. “He's in his studio, and he's just got MIDI controllers for when he’s doing camera switching and stuff like that. So I'm cruising on Twitch, and I'm finding all these characters using all these different techs, and you can't just, like, take them all and say, okay, I’ve got to get one of each…you’ve just got to kind of find what works for you and your shtick and stuff like that. So it's kind of about setting up the delivery method first, getting the local content. I don't care if you're doing 4k, 1080p, whatever. And then once you've got that figured out, then I guess you would have to kind of worry about the delegation from that output to everybody else. And then that's where the codec, the streaming, the ingest, the servers, and the client replication comes in.”
Learn more about innovative live streaming tech at Streaming Media East 2023.