Our small-scale work responded to both the livestream and amateur characteristics. This was our first time livestreaming – we played the video game Fortnite, which pits 100 players against each other in a virtual fight to the death, and also happens to be extremely popular at the moment.

Our lack of experience and affordable/readily available equipment combined with loose structure of the stream responded to the amateur characteristic – it certainly caused a couple of technical hiccups. Six minutes into the livestream it stopped displaying anything for 20 or so seconds but our voices remained. From that point on, I noticed in post that Nat’s voice wasn’t synced with her mouth movements anymore. Aside from that, I noticed my voice was echoing quite a bit throughout the stream. I think this was because Nat didn’t use a headset – it wasn’t something we really thought about but the audio quality definitely could have been better.

So what did we learn from these mistakes? I feel as if a technical check before a livestream is probably a necessity. It should be treated as if cameras are about to roll on a film set. Also maybe wearing a headset or even using a better microphone could go a long way, even if the content is amateur. Amateurs have to improve, right? For a first run, it wasn’t a disaster. We got to do what we planned to do.

However, did our amateur content get lost in the sea of other amateur content? As one could predict, yes. Our peak live viewership of 3 taught us that first hand. Something I guess I may have simply skimmed over was the fact that while there is a lot of amateur content on the internet, a huge chunk of it is barely seen. This fact might put it into perspective: 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Conducting this test, the main thing I think I’ve learnt is that you have to be unique. What we streamed wasn’t necessarily bad in my eyes, no unmitigated disaster that’s for sure. But when there are thousands of people online doing the same thing as you, well why would anyone watch you above someone else?

In my first blog post I talked about how equipment and costs were so low regarding video production and livestreaming. I didn’t acknowledge that this could lead to saturation, therefore I didn’t really focus enough on this being an obstacle we had to overcome. The lack of an audience made it difficult to practice interacting with an audience which was a bit of a shame, but we got to practice most other aspects of the medium, and most importantly learn from our oversights. During my second blog post I spoke about the reading from third week on new media by Manovich, and how it allows us to create infinite versions of the same content with slight variations. While the possibilities are infinite, after our experiencing streaming amateur content my real takeaway is that it is vital not to get lost among the clones.

Going forward I want to be asking myself how I can stand out among the abundance of online screen works. What are the qualities of the most successful ones? How can we draw in viewers to create that sense of interactivity we’re after? How can we create live content that people really want to watch?