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Comment by Akkuma | Hacker News Reader

I've done coding through twitch and checked out livecoding.tv before deciding whether I wanted to stick to twitch or move there, since I do/did game streaming on twitch. I ran across several concerns about livecoding.tv such as they don't show you the current viewer count of a stream while listing the streams, they show only the total views, and they specifically require logging in to accomplish anything on the site.

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...

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Hey - sorry we have not addressed your feedback, its crap and we should be doing better :/ All I can say is we are a small team doing the best we can, and we have had some growing pains. However, that is really no excuse so I am sorry about that.

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.

I just want to clarify that wasn't me who originally made that request. I ran across it while reading up on livecoding.tv awhile back.

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.

The way we hope to differentiate ourselves is by being really focussed on livestreaming as an educational tool. Definitely there are many features we would like to develop, but it is still early days yet!

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!

If you could figure out a way for a viewer to live "fork" the code they're watching, make their own changes, then send a merge request, you might have something very interesting on your hands.

that would be pretty cool!

The IDE idea is fantastic... Sort of like a real-time git. It would be absolutely invaluable as a learning tool.

It would also be nice if we could see the chat stream without having to login (read-only of course).

A common use case (and I'd imagine most common use case) is someone building an app from scratch. Usually this takes more than one video. The videos on the user page, and on the main video viewing page do not have a date.

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.

Hi - frankly the usability around discovering videos right now is not great, I totally recognise that. I appreciate your suggestion and we will definitely be finding ways to improve it, including adding dates.

I think that semi-enforcing a Series title and automatically adding an Episode number would help greatly.

As long as it had sensible defaults, and was easy enough to change, I think it would make everyone's life a bit easier.

Even a sequence number that a video was created by that author would help hugely, if I know that Lesson 2 was #92 then I know that Lesson 3 can't be #0 through #91

I'd settle for https://www.livecoding.tv/livestreams/ actually having, well, livestreams. Nothing more frustrating when trying to watch a live stream on the live stream page and finding one that looks interesting, only to find it's not actually live.

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