After numerous months of streaming our live games on Twitch, I have opted to drop the parallel effort and move entirely over to YouTube Live. Functionally, Twitch is much more capable and feature full, but there simply is no audience for our gaming materials and I don’t post actual video games. As such, with all our content, we have managed to only find one or two subscribers. Generally, whenever one adds, another one drops. Since Twitch also doesn’t keep the videos archives for more than a couple weeks, there isn’t much content.
Instead, I do some basic editing, then post the same content to YouTube. I can’t say the audience there is huge, but there actually has been some semi-steady growth over the last several months. And given our material, one platform is functionally simpler to deal with. Plus, I honestly just prefer the YouTube methodology to pre-schedule streams.
Format remains the same – live stream during our game sessions (to YouTube at this point), then after the game a bit of editing. Once trimmed down and cleaned up, I will repost the same session for long term archiving and views, and remove the live-stream.
I have also consolidated the StreamElements configuration and can now show better chat and announcements. Still playing with the options – it allows for the combination of chat from various streaming platforms into a single chat thread.
The Twitch channel will remain for at least the next few weeks while the existing content rolls off, at which point it really will be a dead platform for my purposes. I would encourage the audience to make the transition as well, but that really only applies to the single follower that exists.
