It's an interesting idea but the main blocker is man power. At i52 we could have done this, but I'm much happier with how stream 2 (props to atmo) turned out because we got an insane amount more overall coverage of games because of stream 2. At any future event, it will be more likely that we can get more out of a second casting stream than a third person POV stream, and at some events even if we had the 3 stream manpower I still think having as many casting streams as possible is better. Even if the third stream covers the same things as stream 1 but is the noob friendly stream I'd rather that over a third person stream.
Maybe if we had the potential for 4 streams (but then stream 1 + stream 1 noob + stream 2 + stream 2 noob) it would make more sense than having another casting stream, but we're a long way off having 3 simultaneous streams let alone 4.

Lifting weights, other video games, programming, maths, computer hardware and electronic music.
I also enjoy cooking but don't really have time/can't be bothered to cook very often.
I've also played drums for "8 years", but haven't touched them in 4 years since moving away from home and not having space in my inner city flats for a drum kit :'(

While I personally would prefer say team logos or something similar, adding sponsor logos into the game is a big thing we can do for sponsors and lord knows we need more sponsors so I can see this trend continuing.

Seen this opinion elsewhere but I don't think it would be very easy to make it possible to show multiple map scores which is quite important for EU streams

In theory yes, given that we know what's going to happen 20 seconds in advance it's not too hard to show, but we can still miss things by not paying close enough attention to the cheat feed, or the cheat feed might be misleading for example it might say a soldier hits a 100 dmg airshot, but really it was just a direct as someone fell off gully mid but there's no way to know that in advance.

In the (rare) games these days where we don't have the cheat feed due to whatever reason, following the uber is generally the way to go of course.

Some casters do use the 20sec cheat feed that streamers use and it turns out fairly well. Some casters on the other hand would find they were casting in advance. There is also a live feed available that isn't 20 seconds behind, but I think we need to raise some caster awareness of it. However, there is a lot of information there so it can be hard to extract the useful information out of it.

The previous map scores are there so that people who join the stream in the second map don't ask what the first map score was. Of course you get the odd person who can't read what's in front of them, but it stops the majority of questions like that.
Since (in Europe) we switched to the NA casting overlay which currently only supports a single map, the amount of questions we have from people wanting to know the first map score is staggering.
I'd also disagree about the first map score being irrelevant. If the first map was a 5-0 roll to one team, you could look at how the other team might be demoralised, or if the other team is now winning 4-0 then it's worth noting the comeback compared to the first map.

This is possible through a texture replacement. If you look closely at the GXL stream, the cap point logos were replaced by the Corsair Gaming logo. If we get logos for all the teams we can certainly do this.

What do you mean?

http://puu.sh/ca6oS/c853e3dbf4.png

You can see the actual percentage on the left.
Glancing at the advantage number is much easier than looking at both uber %s and taking one away from the other.
It also shows which medigun is being used.

Would you rather watch the pocket being ubered if I could show you the roamer hitting a double airshot or a scout coming in on the cleanup for a 3k or something along those lines? Similarly, say the casters are talking about the demo on mid but I can see the roamer is going to go huge, would you rather miss the roamer going huge to have the player the casters are talking about on camera?

Genuine question, it's something that's conflicted me for a little while. Currently I go for show all the cool shit and it seems to go down well in general, but there's still a part of me that thinks people might prefer seeing the general flow of an uber or watching the player the casters are talking about. However, when I see that happen and the sniper hits a headshot I've seen complaints about the camera guy. Can't win I guess?

Any opinions welcome.

Wouldn't prevent people asking about it which is the main point of having the previous map scores

This would be a good idea, not sure if it's possible to animate the HUD panels like that though, will mention it.

Player names: agree (see my post above)
Player health: big disagree, it's the best way to see how a 1v1 is progressing, or whether someone behind could make a difference etc

Definitely something we can look into, maybe coupled with caster cameras during rollouts or something?

After compression etc the effect would be pretty miniscule.

As a streamer I wouldn't use these permanently (although they were during GXL), but the main time I would use them is in the case where I know the trap will be effective, I can flash the outlines up for a quick second to locate the trap, then go into freecam over the trap which I think is the best way to spectate one since from the demo's POV it's usually in some corner of the screen and from the dying player's POV you just see them explode seemingly randomly.

This is a (more recent) feature we have as far as I know, hasn't been used yet though I don't think.

I set up player alias binds for all prem teams this season, although they might need updating at the moment, haven't been following much due to IRL stuff. Myself Sim and Suyo all use them though as far as I know.

Corsair/PBL/extv logos were used throughout the maps during GXL. This was a basic texture replacement on the computer running TF2 for the stream, didn't affect the players at all. Player models are harder to implement but it's been discussed/investigated already and seems possible.

Has been added to statusspec, used all through GXL, although it can affect the binds we use to spectate with the current tftv hud which needs to be updated to allow it.

Making it any smaller would make it challenging to fit with the HUD

we used this at i52, I personally thought it was too cluttered, but if there's enough requests for it it can be added back in.

I think our current online TFTV setup is pretty optimal in terms of info without visual clutter. I'd personally like to have player names with the player models but I don't know how it could be done without adding too much clutter. I'd expect casters to use it though.

We've toyed with using this for online casts, just haven't got round to setting it up properly yet

Despite how much we'd like to be able to pair up a play by play caster with a colour/analytic caster, it often just depends on who is available. I.e. we need more casters. If you want to give casting a try then just, we could always use more. On top of that, as much as we'd like to get invite/prem analyst casters, they're usually busy playing.

The secret is that TFTV is a bunch of volunteers spending a shitload (more than you think) of money and time on making quality content for this game. We aren't perfect, there are issues that we do our best to fix. We are also using consumer equipment, largely purchased by ourselves from our own money or obtained at the result of months of negotiations with sponsors that you guys have no knowledge of, design of assets such as the fancy animated overlays that takes literally hundreds or even thousands of hours by multiple people. Then you have people like thesupremecommander and gentlemanjon and bluee and mathsad and more who you guys don't hear about but put in possibly more work than anyone making plugins and overlay systems to make it easier for us to bring you such a high quality broadcast.

What we are capable of doing with TF2 streaming is nothing short of a miracle. A year ago we streamed with png overlays that we had to make in photoshop every cast, we had binds to make changing POVs easier and we (in Europe) had a cheat feed to help us catch the action. That was it.

Now we have a highly configurable, easy to use web interface that can control the entire overlay system including scene transitions. We have plugins that can give you outlines and health bars and player names and stopping the scoreboard from hiding the player list and showing the currently equipped mediguns and for fixing the hud after pauses as well as the cheat feed (which is getting US use) and player binds.

We can even go further than that, such as getting some of the biggest sponsors we have ever had, and doing more for our sponsors such as having their advertising in game. Having more, bigger sponsors for TF2 that we can impress is only a good thing for this game.

This is all the result of thousands of hours of work, most of which the community has no idea even happened. When you essentially say "the entire stream is ruined because I don't like the casters and the colours are a little off" that is the biggest of first world problems in TF2.

TF2 has grown immensely recently and everything we have achieved with this game has been a community effort. The community is the best thing about this game, no other game has this.

While I do agree wholeheartedly, anyone who thinks they could do a better job casting/streaming should try it before they talk shit (and please do, we could always use more streamers/casters), there is a valid counter argument in that you don't need to be skilled at something to point out when something is unskilled. For example, I doubt most Music/Film/Food critics are expert musicians, directors or chefs. Similarly, someone who doesn't cast can recognise that a caster has issues to work out. Again though, you really should try it before you talk shit.