[Reruns] 🎞️ Strategy

[Marstead]

Howdy folks!

About two years ago, Twitch rolled out Uploads for the first time. I was pretty pumped about it -- finally, a way to get some exposure out of games we beat years ago. I spent several months uploading a couple hundred videos to Twitch. However, the feature was only in Beta, and it changed so drastically when it went to 1.0 that it broke all of my uploads up to that point. That took all the wind out of my sails.

Uploading itself was fraught with issues; a 9GB file would be stuck in "Processing" for days and you'd generally have to re-attempt uploads 2-3 times to get them to take. There were also major issues with viewers in what was then called "VODCASTING", because Vodcasts were not clearly separated from live streams on the Browse page for games.

Well, it's two years later, and the Uploads system has changed quite a bit. Vodcasts are now called "Reruns" and seem to work just fine, and they are very clearly labeled as Reruns on the Browse page. So I want to take another swing and importing the entire VOD archive onto Twitch. Here is the rundown.

Clearing Out the Pipes

• I started by completely deleting all prior Uploads, including all prior Collections.
• I was the first streamer to report to Twitch that there was a secret limit of 100 Collections allowable, so my plan to use it as a set of archival playlists for each game series was not going to work.
• There was a method to my uploading madness in 2017, but because of the changeover from Beta to 1.0, my strategy was tanked. 
• As a result the Uploads look random and all over the place, with no organization. Also, many of these videos did not qualify for Reruns because of being uploaded during Beta.
• Rather than try to clean up every old video, I simply deleted all of them to start fresh.

Upload Order

• Going forward, I am going to attempt to export every VOD from YouTube over to Twitch.
• Rather than trying some crazy strategy of prioritizing which VODs to load first, I am just going to load everything in chronological order from the original recording date.
• Because Twitch provides almost no organizational tools for Uploads, to keep things clean, I am going to load entire game series together.
  
• In other words, even though we played EarthBound and Mother 3 at the same time, I am going to start by loading all of EarthBound and then all of Mother 3.
  

Collections Strategy

• I will be organizing videos into chronological Collections.
• In addition to the limit of 100 total Collections, there's a limit of 100 videos/collection. I'm going to make the first Collection be something like "VODs Jan - Apr 2015", the second "Apr - Aug 2015", etc.
• If the Collections tab is ever expanded beyond 100 or any further organizational options are added, I will switch this over to put each game series into its own Collection, to mirror YouTube's playlist system.

Rerun Timing

• I am going to try to run Reruns during stream off-hours basically every day, following the chronological order of the uploads.
• Reruns are valuable because they expose the channel on the Browse page of games. While under normal circumstances no one searching for Chrono Trigger will ever find the channel again, Reruns can make us visible to these folks again.
• When Vodcasts first launched, it was impossible to tell the difference between live channels and vodcasts. This pissed a lot of people off. But now, Reruns are clearly marked.
• My hope would be to start Reruns immediately after stream ends each day, unless we have an important host target, and then run them up as close as possible to the next day's start of stream.
• Reruns should be running all weekend when possible.

Potential Issues

• There are some issues we'll need to work out with the rerun system.
• Quality Options: It looks like Reruns follow quality options the same way regular streams work. I'm not sure if triggering a Rerun during a livestream with Quality Options will guarantee that they will be awarded, but I'll be trying that next week.
• If there's no guarantee on Quality Options when transitioning from Live to Rerun I might offer an additional SP incentive for folks to help with getting transcoding for the Rerun.
• SP Generation: Bots are incapable of distinguishing between truly live streams and premiering or Rerun streams.
• I don't want to give out the normal SP generation rate for Reruns, as that would cause a ton of inflation and unfairly favor folks who have the data to let reruns run indefinitely.
• Finding the right amount of SP generation is tricky -- too much and everyone will feel like they need to sit afk in the channel all the time, and too little and no one will bother to bump the numbers.
• I'll spend the next couple weeks trying to tweak this. Since bots cannot distinguish between Live & Reruns, I will have to manually change the SP generation rate at the start and end of streams.
• I'm going to start the SP Generation rate for reruns at 1 SP / 25 Minutes, about 5 times slower than live. The subscriber SP multiplier applies to this.
• Average Concurrent Viewers: Twitch doesn't distinguish between Reruns or Live videos either, and so it includes Rerun viewers in your average concurrents calculation.
• In other words, running Reruns is going to tank the channel's average concurrents.
• At this point, this score is irrelevant -- the next time it would matter would be at 75 average concurrents, the requirement for partnership.
• If we ever get within spitting distance of 75 concurrents, I'll temporarily stop reruns. But while we're nowhere near it, we may as well run them.
• VOD Views: Reruns acquire views which "count" for viewers browsing the uploads page for a given game, but it's a little tricky.
• These views only "count" for 30 days, after which uploads vanish forever from the Browse page and can only be found on a streamer's Videos page.
• So in theory, you'd want to get as many views from a Rerun on a VOD as possible in those first 30 days, so that the VOD appears very high in the browser list.
• The stress/hassle that would go into strategizing around this is way too high to be worth the effort. In any event, if you can hang out for ~2-3 minutes at the end of the live stream so your views count for part of the Reruns, that will help a lot!
• Hosting: Reruns obviously conflict with hosting.
• I keep going back and forth on hosting. It feels like at our channel size, it's not really productive, and not terribly helpful for the host target.
• I think we can still suspend Reruns in the event there's a really important host target (like a friend of the channel doing a marathon stream, or something similar). But generally I think Reruns will work better for channel growth overall.

Goals

• This might all seem like more effort than it's worth, so here's why I'm bothering with the project.
• The surest path to high-quality "true fans" joining the channel is exposure. 
• With a variety channel, exposure is very challenging. And our theme makes it extra difficult, because once we beat a game, we never return to it.
• With reruns, folks can get a glimpse into the channel even when we're not live, for games we beat a long time ago.
• The dream scenario with Reruns is for one to be running when no one is streaming a Let's Play for that game.
• That way, someone browsing has at least something to click on.
• Getting all of our VODs onto Twitch is a good idea too -- we're sort of in an "all eggs in one basket" situation with YouTube VODs right now.
• Diversifying the VOD portfolio onto Twitch will help protect us if YouTube suddenly makes a big policy change (like an upload limit) as they've done in the past.

Outlook

• I'm going to experiment with this project for a couple months. If it looks like it's drawing any new followers or regulars, I'll keep it going and continue to loop through the rerun history.
• I expect it will take about a year for me to transfer every VOD from YouTube to Twitch, and a similar amount of time to run all of them as rerun.
• If we hit June or July and Reruns seem to be more trouble than they're worth, I'll stop running them and switch to just uploading VODs to Twitch as an alternate repository for them.

Thanks!

-Dylan ("Marstead")