By Dillon Cassidy
Chances are if we’ve been in proximity in the last year, I’ve probably murmured something to you about streaming. To get to the point, the Crowd is going digital in 2018, and the way we’re doing that is on Twitch. Below is “DILLON’S REASONS WHY STREAMING IS NEAT/THE FUTURE.”
INTERACTIVITY
Improv is this semi-magical experience that exists and then it doesn’t. It lives and dies. Recordings never really capture the same feeling as being there in the moment, but being able to watch it live is definitely a step closer to being there in person. I’m very curious about what a rowdy chat room would look like if it was all people that were watching the same show.
SCALING
As an improviser, you will never play to a stadium-sized audience. There are some hard limits on what can we done with the artform. It lives best in small theaters, with a warm house. With a dedicated live stream, you can turn a 30 seat theater into a thousand-viewer streaming studio.
DEMAND
There is a market for this. I know when I was in college, I was so hungry to see improv, but there weren’t any options available to me. Streaming on Twitch would fill this need for anyone looking to watch improv without easy access to a physical theater. Improv is on the rise. Tons of small venues are popping up across the country and every college and university seems to have their own team these days.
EXPOSURE
Twitch is Global. It reaches people all over the planet. We’ve had hundreds of people from outside of Chicago stumble upon our channel and we haven’t even been trying yet. Furthermore, it opens up our hours of operation, we could potentially field shows for folks in different time zones.
Now, why Twitch? Here are some #hotfacts
- The most popular shows regularly pull 40,000 viewers.
- The peak viewers for any single stream is just over a million viewers.
- As of of 2017 Twitch was averaging 622,000 concurrent viewers (that’s a lot of eyeballs)
- Twitch has over 15 million Daily Active Users (that's an enormous amount of eyeballs)
- Nearly half of Twitch viewers watch at least 20+ hours of twitch a week.
- Twitch is the 50th most trafficked website. If you discount regional google websites, it’s the 38th most trafficked website.
Twitch (and Youtube, etc) embodies the future of broadcasting. It’s a platform dedicated completely to the distribution of live video. While Twitch’s main focus has historically been streaming video games, the tool itself allows for so much more. In addition to the rapid growth and ownership of the live streaming niche, Twitch is set up to provide users with very intuitive ‘channels.’ URLs are very easy, for example:
Twitch is poised to continue to grow and take over an even larger portion of the market space. The bottom line is this - all the tools now exist for an intrepid and driven group of people to come together and create the world’s first DIY TV Network. That’s what we’re going to do. We’ve entered an era in which it’s easier to get your ‘show’ to people, than it is to get ‘people’ to your show.
We’re excited to do this but we can’t do it alone. If you’ve got ideas please submit them to us here. Here’s what we’re looking for:
- Something more than just a show with cameras on.
- Shows that exist completely virtually, and don’t necessitate the use of the crowd space.
- Digital content curators.
- Shows that take risks.
- Shows that do something to engage with a twitch chat.
- Shows that with diverse casts.
Love,
Dillon
