Back in June of 2008, Show Me Your News started to use a website, with a wonderful resulting success. It allowed us to broadcast episodes live to users, while they used the site’s built-in chatroom to interact with fans and the hosts. We reached their front page many times, got on good terms with them, and even once had 233 viewers watch a random stream of Metroid.
However, today marks the end of the STICKAM era for SMYN.
As I discovered today, Stickam has made several changes to their livestreaming process that have made it a completely user-unfriendly experience. Here are the low-lights, in a bulleted format.
– The video window is larger, but the resolution has taken a major hit. I had to restart a couple times before a still image looked half-way reasonable.
– Livestreamer’s mics are muted my default upon starting the broadcast. There is an option to change this via unchecking a box, but even if you save this, the box just becomes checked again. Lovely!
– Speaking of muted mics, when you watch someone else’s channel, their channel is muted by default! You have to unmute it in order to realize that they actually have sound playing.
– Even though the old method of changing microphone and camera settings are intact, they don’t affect anything. Instead, there is a new settings button where all this can be changed. Highly confusing at first.
– There used to be a live monitor of what your microphone level was at all times. This is COMPLETELY GONE from the livestreaming window. Instead, you can only check how loud you are by clicking on the aforementioned settings button. Why the hell was this changed.
Sure, those don’t seem so bad, but brace yourself for the deal-breaker.
Here are the provided options for “Who can enter my Stickam chat:”
– Members Only
– Friends Only
…The end.
That’s right, SMYNjas! If you wanted to join the live chat on future episodes of SMYN, you’d have to create a Stickam account if you didn’t already have one! Random first-time visitors to the site could no longer participate in the chat! WHO DOES THAT?
We will likely be moving to LiveStream before the next episode, as SugarPoultry has given rave reviews on it! Plus, I have major issues with UStream’s chatroom. We’ll get those details to you soon, along with Episode 71 details in the next couple days.
Oh, and Inception video probably tomorrow. Probably? With that, I’m out.
