Livecoding.tv (YC S15) Is Twitch.tv for Coding
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I ultimately went with Twitch as Livecoding.tv has a fairly small userbase, the above negatives from livecoding that haven't changed in months despite the feedback, my app is gaming related, Twitch offers me bots that can help manage and improve the experience, and finally it can help grow my viewerbase for non-coding related streams.
Edit: For proof that they were asked to remove the login requirement months ago http://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/comments/2zmw29/i_am...
Yes we do have a relatively small userbase relative to Twitch, but I guess the reason you would want to come to our site is that our community is focussed on coding, not just entertainment.
Edit: you should be able to watch streams without logging in now.
You don't see much content not served up on YouTube, unless it is a subscription or pay per video. There are certainly a ton of coding videos, yet you don't see a coding centric site. Twitch is already moving toward expanding into other categories such as programming and game development. The only way I see livecoding.tv beating Twitch is if one can get more regular viewers due to the focus on coding and then offer better features around coding, perhaps things like monetization of past videos and tools to edit them. Perhaps a read only ide similar to collaborative editors that allows viewers to follow along with their own font settings, theme, and navigate through the project (I could expand upon that in a lot more detail). I do wish you guys the best of luck as I'd like more Twitch alternatives.
I'm also glad to see the login requirement gone and will try it out to see how many viewers I get without relying upon WatchPeopleCode.
Awesome that you are going to try out Livecoding.tv, hope you enjoy it and let me know if you have any more questions/feedback!
So now it's almost impossible to watch old videos in order. I saw some interesting series I wanted to check out, but clicked around trying to find the beginning and could not find out which one it was and then gave up.
As long as it had sensible defaults, and was easy enough to change, I think it would make everyone's life a bit easier.
I attempted to load the archive of the linked Stephen Wolfram video and hit this: http://i.imgur.com/m1TEJHS.png
Seriously?
According to the sign-up blurb on the right of the window, forced-signing-in-to-watch-videos is the intended behavior, which puts a lot of doubt on the startup sign-up metrics provided. I will never use this service.
Glad to see you guys have realized it's a bad idea though.
It's really interesting. A couple of remarks:
1 - I don't know if you are aware, but there seems to be a bug for lack of a better word.
How to reproduce it:
- Get on the site (not logged in).
- I'm interested in Python for now, so I scroll down to the bottom and click Python in the "Languages" list.
- ISSUE: This doesn't take me to anything Python related, it only takes me to: https://www.livecoding.tv/livestreams/.
- So then I have to click on "Category>Python".
- ISSUE: It still doesn't take me to anythong Python related, it only takes me to: https://www.livecoding.tv/videos/
- So then I have to click on "Category>Python" again, and finally this takes me to: https://www.livecoding.tv/videos/python/
Maybe I'm not really tech savvy, but I think it's too many clicks.
2 - When I'm about to sign in with a GitHub account, it says "Livecodingtv by @MrTomato8 would like permission to access your account". Now, I know it's a serious YC funded company and all, but giving information to Livecodingtv would be easier if it weren't a MrTomato8 asking.
Furthermore, when I click on the GitHub profile, it takes me to MrTomato8 with only one contribution in the last year. This doesn't sell very well for an entity having a channel about coding. I assume the GitHub profile doesn't necessarily reflect on MrTomato8's real skills, but it just doesn't look right for that profile to be asking me, a beginner who wants to stand on the shoulders of giants, for information.
Keep it up and I look forward to signing up in the near future.
Classifying streams by programming language is also kind of odd. Lots of projects use multiple programming languages. A better classification might be what general kind of code is being written (machine learning, graphics, UI, web frontend/backend, games, etc).
That said, I'm very interested in this and hope to see it succeed!
That said, we definitely have a broader focus now and have people doing all sorts of amazing things with code, so thanks for your suggestion!
Classification of streams is also something we are hoping to improve over time so we really appreciate your feedback!
When asked I suggest people stream on youtube.
My #1 concern is this:
On Twitch.TV I would never watch someone who is completely quiet. Half the time I have Twitch up as a passive form of entertainment. Similar to a radio talkshow going on in the background.
When I'm developing software... I don't talk. I might do an odd grumble to myself every once in a while, but the loudest thing in the room, by far, is my keyboard.
Are you expecting developers to talk out their thoughts as they type? Are you expecting people to just stare at a quiet developer's workflow and try to glean information?
Also, this comic strip comes to mind: http://www.commitstrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Strip-...
TL;DR: Why would I as a developer want to use your service? What do I gain from it?
I have previous experience streaming and so immediately got myself in a mindset of talk talk talk. In fact, I stopped working on my project and had an hour or so conversation with viewer/viewers about JavaScript frameworks and a bit of a deep dive on React. To be fair, I've always been someone who yells at the screen while gaming, so extending that kind of behavior of saying what you're thinking while coding isn't too hard for me.
I imagine the same would be true for programming.
That's often true of games too, though, and Twitch has plenty of popular streamers. I think their greater issue is that the steroetypical twitch viewer in their young teens is unlikely to be interested, and older people who might be interested are more likely to be time strapped. Though as I dig around looking for twitch demographics, it looks like the college aged 18-24 is Twitch's biggest group, so there might be a decent overlap.
I wonder if it might be a good idea for them to push the event angle more, with a special focus around on-campus things like hackathons or contests. If you had screen forwarding set up between multiple projects/competitors, it might be interesting to have a "caster" that helped walk viewers through what the different groups were doing.
A good example of what is a good level of communication while pair programming is James Shore's Let's Code stuff: http://www.letscodejavascript.com/ Although it is clearly aimed at teaching, I find that good pair programmers say pretty much the same things as they are going along.
Keeping up this kind of patter is a skill that requires some practice, but it's not really so difficult. It's worth developing IMHO.
Yeah sorry no, it's why I don't use twitch and it's why I won't use livecoding.tv
I myself had to deal heavily with this while working on live streaming and dealing with the client side.
Yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree. The best thing you could do is immediately revoke API keys, change passwords, cancel credit card, etc. I guess you should probably delete the stream too, but if you do these things it's not as important.
If you have anything up on the Internet for any amount of time, you might as well assume that it will be up forever. Someone (or more likely some bot) could have already downloaded it and be mirroring it.
To be honest, haven't really had this be a massive issue up to this point, it has happened a couple of times, but not very often.
It's been pretty good so far, though I've only streamed a couple of times. People actually DID end up watching the stream and participating/asking questions about the project.
So far the one annoying thing with the site has been that there's a video autoplaying each time I go to the home page. I want to go straight to my dashboard or at least stream view when already logged in, and ideally not have an autoplaying video/banner taking up the entire space of the home page above the fold.
Also a suggestion: timestamps would be pretty useful in chat.
Edit: Oh, there already is a request for that.
It was difficult to figure out how to set an avatar at first, I had to go under my stream page and edit there, rather than in the settings. Maybe I'm confused between the distinction between a user and a stream?
Right now, when I see "You must install Adobe Flash to use this site", I close the tab and never return.
[1] - https://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/en/latest/install.html
I coded it live as well (heh), you can check out the vod on my channel https://livecoding.tv/ell
The big downside for me though is the login requirement just to watch - I don't think I'd watch Twitch if I had to login just to see streams. I think getting rid of that would really help you guys grow - code streams are pretty addictive once you start watching.
The benefit of recording is that you can increase the playback speed or fast forward.
Audio annotation is a bonus in both circumstances.
- your notification email should not come from "support"
(at least give the sender a good human-readable name)
- it's good that you're showing a featured stream on the front page
but there seems to be no way to get to their profile page from there
Looks like this was done somewhat intentionally, since in your HTML you have
<i class="fa fa-weixin"></i>
Could you recommend the best one or two - I should at least watch an exemplar before rejecting this out of hand (never had the like in my day, watch someone punch cards out? like watching this new fangled wireless radio).
I guess It's like people listening to game music, will be mainstream in six months
Is there any way to embed your player on another website?
I see you use jwplayer, and I'm not sure how to embed that unless i mangle together some javascript myself.
Something like an iframe that i cant feed
livecoding.tv/:streamer/:embed
would be nice
(Background, i work on a stream browsing website: overrustle.com and some of my users requested to have streams from your site embedded there)
PS: chat embed would be great too!
Not currently able to embed livestreams or chats, but this is something we definitely have in mind to develop, its just a question of priorities. You can request this feature here: http://roadmap.livecoding.tv/
Good luck with your site - looks cool :)
"API – Technical Specification May 2015"
E.g. "Languages I want to learn" and "Favorite Line of code"
I remember on #lisp at Freenode IRC, there was a helpful soul that would help folks by telling them to click a link. Upon landing on the page, the person being helped would see a mirror of the helper's Emacs buffer being updated live as they coded against a Lisp image and the results would show.
Lispers, always seeing ahead of everyone else.
http://chrisdone.com:10001/browse/lisp?events_per_page=50&ev...
The "helper"'s screen name was "nixeagle" and his emacs mirror was at http://i.nixeagle.net:8080/t
Twitch has really changed the entertainment scene (millions of people individually consuming hours of streamed content a day). More importantly, there's a large subset of Twitch streamers who don't just stream for entertainment purposes, but for education as well. Often times, watching someone do a thing is a lot more instructive than reading about someone doing a thing.
There are people getting much better at video games by watching informative streamers. There's no reason to think that, eventually, live stream coding will be another popular form of learning to code as well.
GP post makes me sad, honestly, due to how willfully ignorant that opinion appears to be and the fact that it's so unnecessarily negative towards something that can legitimately help a bunch of people.