We've got a lot of streams that get single digits, a handful with double digits, and rare few players with triple. I know this is gonna sound really funny because of my namesake, but collectivization. Except, you know, without the Soviet themes. Get people from different divs to team up and give sample scrims and discussions. Two open teams buddy up and pump out some hyperbolic time chamber stuff, for instance, or a bunch of jump map professionals do some map exploration.

Get that scattered single-digit-viewers manpower working together.

Well, when streams get high viewer count it's always a player that is ethir charismatic, stabby, an invite player, or internet famous. I feel you could get more views if famous and well known players would team up once and a while and just have some fun, you don't need a tip of the hats for every stream, just players doing what they do best.

I really want to see more streams from the top etf2l players. Sometimes there's almost nothing to watch at 3pm est while you get way more people streaming at north american scrim times.

Actually I just want to see Mike streaming himself playing pocket.

I think having sub catagories on the right side would be cool. All the live invite streams went to an invite list, then a HL list, then a misc (for pubbing, surfing, other games)

Might clutter the right side or it might make finding exactly what you wanted to watch much easier.

Heyo,

I think it's awesome opening up tf.tv and seeing that long list of streams down the right side of the screen. However, I never really delve into the low viewer count streams unless I know the guy/girl.

This might sound kinda silly, but I basically judge the book by it's cover. If the title interests me enough, I'll check out the stream for a bit, give it a chance, and if it interests me I'll stay, if not, I'll move onto the next streamer.

For example (Not a really good one), when Hellbent was streaming today, his title was ":-}" (Without quotes).The title itself interested me, because it wasn't the usual "Mge, than scrims l8r", and it didn't roll off the sidebar with a "...", so it stood out for me. I also knew hellbent from pugs and through people I hung out with and was aware of him and his jumping goodies. From there I checked it out, and it entertained me, and I closed it after getting asked to play a pug.

In short(And I think this goes for a good percentage of the community as well); For a stream to get my attention it either has to 1) Be a highly skilled player where I can learn something and take away from their stream, 2) Be a person that I know, or 3) Have enough follower so I wonder why all of these people are watching (EX: Labialuke). Another thing that will help alot is if the streamer is unique and can offer something on the table that no one else can.

I think a preference system would be really neat (Even though I don't think this is something that is accomplishable), almost like StumbleUpon, but differently. So let's say you can choose preferences with your twitch account, like whenever TF2 comes up, twitch will notify you. On the other side of the coin, whenever someone streams, they can add tags to the stream, like "#Valve #TF2 #Scout #Mge". If I had #scout and #mge in my preferences, it will notify me, so I will check it out. This would be cool for streamers starting out because they would get more attention and it would be easier to build a player base. This is mostly food for thought, an idea that came to me as I was typing the above statements.

Apologies for the wall of text, I rambled for a bit.

This is more of a personal quibble, but can we please not have three or four channels all casting the same bloody game every time? I'd rather have the opportunity to watch the match I want to see instead of having to pick between the casters, it feels like I'm having to play favorites, and a violation of rule 15 (and 12, to a certain extent >_> ). Come on people, I'm sure your love of the game is greater than the collective egos...

One idea that springs to mind is to feature a few of the lower-end streams that stream consistently, or a bot-powered stream that cycles between streams at random (which might come in handy when a ton of people are casting matches all at once).

I'll think of more ideas later...

Not sure if this is going to help the discussion but I put this together a couple weeks ago, and I figured it might help the discussion. The top 20 list is there and then I looked up a bunch of other people because I was curious.

October 2
http://puu.sh/4Wk00.png (for full size)

October 22
http://puu.sh/4WHRf.png (for full size)

http://puu.sh/4WHRf.png

Take it with a grain of salt. It says nothing about the number of hours streamed or anything.
It's literally just the number I found on their Twitch page.

[Edit] Updated from Oct. 2 to Oct. 22, 2013.

blank was playing justin bieber when i clicked on his stream

:{

I'm all for brainstorming streaming ideas that could maybe help growth speed up, but I can't think of any at the moment. We've already got a huge variety of content and it keeps getting bigger but between the 42 streams that were live I'm sure we have about every aspect of TF2 related content covered. I think the stream viewership is steadily growing, but unless it's a casted match(especially frontpage d casted matches) the viewer pool is basically the same 400-500 people every night.

I think having more leagues would be the biggest benefit to competitive growth. The options are honestly not that great right now. What I would like to see SO much is someone drop $5000 or more and just run a tournament. Not a league, a tournament. Think of the dota 2 tourneys that run over the period of a month or so. Start with group stage, then have a playoff bracket. CEVO sennhesier tournament and the MGE Cup were good things, and I would love to see more of them. We don't need another LEAGUE to compete with ESEA(although that would be nice), we just need more competitive content in general.

Bottom line is casts of competitive matches with big name players draw the most viewers, but there are usually only 1-2 decent high level matches per week, because our ONLY real option right now is ESEA. CEVO is going in the right direction, and has a $600 first place cash prize, but I think some tournaments with sponsorships has the biggest potential to catapult tf2 to the top games on twitch more often.

A shift away from ESEA automation and dominance on the competitive tf2 market would be nice, and I don't think the LAN is preventing other events from being successful. Do you think Mix, iT, and all the other invite teams would ignore an event with even something as small as $5000 of cash prizes for the top 3 seeds? Another LEGIT event that attracts high level teams to sign up will give tftv and other outlets more matches to cast, and more attractive content for viewers, which would just trickle down to everyone.

I rambled but yeah, someone needs to throw money at tf2 gamers. More $ for tf2 = more high level players/teams = more matches to cast = more frontpaging on twitch = more viewership for tf2 streams overall = I made it back to the point of the post.

valve

we need to cut one of ruwins eyes out of his goddam face and then implant it with a robot eyeball with a bionic blink muscle developed by goddam NASA with wi-fi and just have him stream his life.

I want to see more demo reviews streamed. I love that shit and feel like its underrepresented. Would much rather watch that then surfing.

Hi friends I haven't really been around the TF community lately but I an idea was presented to me and since I had considered myself a spreadsheet wizard I took up the challenge. In reality I spent too much time working on this project and there's probably dozens of other ways that this could be done, but this is the easiest in a sense. So here I present to you a pseudo-ranking system of your favorite TF2 streamers:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1x5LF6JkrxlfovpAWKHHuRhJ_tEBGFi35P-zxvUF47As/viewform

All the front-end is done there and essentially I'm going to just be collecting data for the time being while I continue to work on the back-end of the form. Most likely the data will be publicly available after 72 hours of me posting this. Depending on how much I end up sleeping/playing video games that could change but I'll really honestly try to have the back-end entirely finished within the next 3 days.

Hopefully with information like this streamers can improve their own content and such based on their ratings.

edit: pls a reminder to contact me with issues i will fix them as soon as i recieve your message pending there aren't larger issues

edit2: im really going to encourage you use a way to identify your self as well, it really helps in promoting accurate results.

We already know what they'd say, though.

I think that Sean hit the right idea. Now we just need some rich person/organization...

is there an easy to set up banner for tf.tv that we can put on our stream pages?

i've noticed when i stream, it seems to attract some people who don't normally watch tf2 since i play a bunch of random games during the week and eventually go back towards just pubbing tf2 all the time, so when people get to see me pug in 6v6 or 9v9, i get viewers that ask about competitive tf2 and i try to refer to them here, but i think it'd be easier to have an easy to copy banner that anyone can use on their twitch page

it could also be because i'm streaming when everyone else is asleep/just waking up because of timezones too

i would probably watch tf2 streams again f tri streamed again

but i think he died rip

I'll add something to this thread when I get a chance:
http://teamfortress.tv/forum/thread/11753-new-to-streaming-read-these-guides/1#post-1

In the meantime, here is something that you can use as one of your panes on your stream.

http://i.imgur.com/UGhLDcx.png

http://imgur.com/UGhLDcx
Sorry I haven't yet updated the logo.

I find it hard to enjoy watching the single digit streamers because a big part of the stream is the chat experience. Not only interacting with the streamer, but others watching as well. If chat is dead, watching that streamer is a lot less fun.

Also, I'm not sure if it would implement well on TF.TV, but I like how SRL pulls up a random stream when you go there. I found a lot of my favourite streamers that way. You never know if you'll like them if you don't try it first.

Mangachu is both #11 and #26 on your list.

No that's mangachu_ and mangachu. He has two accounts. I just looked up the 20 biggest Twitch accounts on the Twitch team. Sorry for the confusion. He's top 10 by view count if you combine the two.

Also honorable mentions are people who didn't accept the Twitch team invite.

oh shit, i'm in top 40 \m/

A "random" stream discovery button might be cool.

Really like the category idea. This would make it a lot easier to watch what people want and see if anything's lacking. Categories could be Invite/Plat, 6's/HL, Jumpers/Surfers, Pubbers, etc. Most will probably overlap but a good chunk of streamers generally stream the same material. The categories could be color coded or something.

I wrote a pretty lenghty post just a few days ago on tf2 streams (here) but my opinion is that it doesn't matter even if we have 100 concurrent streams if we keep pulling an average 2-3 viewers per stream. I haven't noticed the concurrent viewers number increase as much as the concurrent streamers numbers have increased, which is a shame.

Wheres Bogtv? atm we are 5th below extv. We cant have gained that many viewers between october 2nd and today.

My ranking makes me confused, happy and worried all at the same time

It's not exactly related to this but a while ago there was a discussion about people putting their twitch.tv stream in their steam name whilst streaming. People said they'd use the tf.tv url if it was shorter (eg. http://www.twitch.tv/yourname vs http://teamfortress.tv/streams/view/yourname)

If it is possible to shorten it some way this could bring more traffic to streams and the site.

i guess not

TF2 needs more money in general, and not just for this.

With the growing dissatisfaction with ESEA, it's become clear that people want another league.... but a league that cares about TF2 and has a professional staff, established anti-cheat team, good servers and most importantly a prize pool and ideally a LAN. All of that takes money that doesn't exist.

While I realize it's a pipe dream, it might be worth it for the community to actually pool our resources and seek a sponsor together. Praying for Valve to grace us with the funds seems like praying for rain in the Sahara. If it were going to come, it seems like it should have done so already.