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Comment by skizm | Hacker News Reader

So they got an exclusive deal with a Counter Strike league (ESEA?) and I decided to watch some matches... Horible experience. Just god awful. Forced chat showing, emojis everywhere, no theater mode, like 15 FPS and choppy as hell. Pure crap. I’m real interested in CSGO and flat out didn’t watch any matches till they made their way to YouTube. Idk what they spent that $1B on.

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Similar experience with Dota 2 and ESL on Facebook. The experience was horrible. Viewership was bad. Doesn't seem like anyone was happy about it https://twitter.com/Slasher/status/1071863217243197440

If I recall correctly, people on Twitch streamed games from the Dota Majors/Minors and got more viewers than the Facebook stream. Then ESL started DMCA'ing streams https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/7skt8e/did_mlpdota_j... Then Valve got involved and made a statement about the whole kerfuffle http://blog.dota2.com/2018/01/dotatv-streaming/

Yet another example of the DMCA being completely, insanely imbalanced in terms of power for those issuing take-downs, call me when anybody at ESL goes to jail for perjury.

It wasn't a great experience, but I personally felt like the outage was a loud overreaction from the community. I guess that the circumstances were perfect for outrage: Facebook is not likeable, it's a big change from twitch, and Facebook paid for exclusivity. I was fine with watching the games on Facebook, and part of me wishes they succeeded so that we wouldn't have a twitch monopoly.

It was just five or six years ago when my friends and I found Twitch website unbearable. We'd always watch twitch on vlc using live streamer http://docs.livestreamer.io/

Today, we have YouTube Live and to a much smaller extent mixer. More importantly, I'm not afraid to open Twitch on a desktop web browser. What changed? The main change is reliable 60fps streaming.

If Facebook can't do 60fps on day one, it might as well not try.

I remember asking Justin tv engineers whether they thought they could break even. They said it is more than enough to show one thirty second ad every hour (as far as I remember) to keep the lights on. But then this was before Twitch partner programs. Also we were streaming from potato quality laptop webcams. Watching 240p video with 20 second latency was an ordinary miracle.

I imagine the costs are likely much higher today. But I'm curious. Did Facebook spend a billion dollars on content deals?

The community definitely overreacted, but the experience really was pretty poor. I watched it on fb (because I like the ESL production and I don't hate facebook), but I had serious connectivity and quality problems even if I have fibre. On top of this the platform is just not that great, I can't think of a single feature that was better than Twitch.

I don't have any insights into how Facebook screwed up here, so speculating is dicey. That said, this pattern of BigCorp doing product "B" which is supposed to the the same as product "A" which is popular and from someone else, and failing miserably at it. That is a fairly common pattern. I have seen it happen at two separate companies where I worked and in both cases it was an edict from "on high" that there be a competitor product created, but nobody on the management team (and in one case the engineering team) had ever used the competitor's product, or understood why someone would use the product. The result was a product that checked all the same boxes but without any of the execution touches that made the product successful.

I could imagine someone at Facebook said, "Hey, look how much screen time Twitch gets with our users, we should do something to make that Facebook screen time instead. Let's make a Twitch clone, how hard can it be?" And gave it to a development team that had no idea why someone would spend time on Twitch. Google was pretty infamous for doing this (how many IM systems have they built now? 8?)

Interestingly, YouTube gaming is basically an attempt to fight back against Twitch, and I find YouTube streaming works far better than Twitch streaming. I just get far higher quality streams with fewer glitches. Not all edicts from on high are created equal

The technical streaming aspects work better, unfortunately trying to actually discover who is streaming games you care about is almost completely impossible to the point of absurdity.

Its been like this for years now, I don't understand how anyone at youtube can not understand how awful discoverability is for live streaming.

Not sure what the issue is? At gaming.youtube.com there is a live tab, where you select the game, on youtube.com/gaming you select the game you care about, then click the live tab.

> Google was pretty infamous for doing this (how many IM systems have they built now? 8?)

Don't get me started. I think my Google Voice / Hangouts account will be deprecated soon, or has been, and will be eliminated, or maybe not. It's not clear. It never is.

it'll probably be nearly the same thing, renamed, that does an oauth url dance that breaks 40% of the time. it'll have even fewer useful buttons, all hidden until you hover over hidden icons, and those buttons won't do anything the previous hangouts did before. there will likely be a few people that get big bonuses and promotions out of it as well, and they'll write up post-mortems from afar after they've been poached by some new vc-funded darling.

Google voice has been all but deprecated at this point. The form for buying credits has been broken for a year, and calls calls to my google voice number no longer get forwarded to my phone / google hangouts.

Mine still get forwarded just fine. I wonder what fresh hell porting my Google Voice number over to another carrier will be.

I definitely worry about this, I've had this phone number for almost 20 years now.

Can't agree with this enough. The whole CSGO community hates this deal, and it's hard to believe that ESL has made up for the lost audiences with the money from Facebook.

Although, maybe not, it's also hard to believe they manage to monetize me watching CSGO, considering I already own the game, a tower, the best mousepad, the best CS mouse, a mech keyboard, and two monitors...

It was ESL, but you're not really wrong because ESEA was purchased by ESL a few years back.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/18/16903872/esl-streaming-par...

The discovery was awful too. They had a similar exclusivity deal for some Dota 2 tournaments, and I could not find the stream from the Facebook home page while it was live.

Youtube has a similar problem, It's almost impossible to figure out who the hell is actually streaming a specific game, search for streams, or even when the people you are subscribed to are streaming.

I would have forgiven most things like lower viewership if the stream itself was at least reliable. That said, Google/Facebook's requirement that you use some "real name" just goes against what gamers prefer: anonymity.

I thought Google got rid of the real name policy

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-reverses-real-names-pol...

They did the same thing with ESL Dota 2 tournaments, I am a pretty big Dota 2 fan, but was utterly uninterested in putting up with Facebook, and nearly everyone else I am friends with in that community, and people in the wider community felt the same way.

Everyone I know just watched other streamers stream it from the Valve in game client with their own commentary and production (Valve explicitly allows any streamer to stream any DOTA or CS game)

I suspect ESL did serious damage to their brand by essentially being absent from the e-sports scene for basically their entire audience for the last year.

Seems like a completely out of touch way to throw away a $1B.

It is really frustrating when viewership and satisfaction would be much higher on twitch

https://www.facebook.com/ELEAGUETV/videos/140452340226548/

(video has no relevance here other than being an awesome csgo highlight from last night)

Sounds like the Facebook MLB Game of the week telecast, where the usual team broadcasts are superceded and the result is unwatchable. You can shut off the emoji screen by clicking the right secret option, but it resumes after every commercial break.

It's like something a teenaged Instagram influencer would design.

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