 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, my guest is Dr. Leon Sifers, the owner of LS eSports. And our topic is streaming media, the impact on eSports. Welcome, Dr. Sifers. Hello, thank you for having me today. All right, so what is your background in eSports and technology? Well, I got my bachelor's in electrical engineering and I first began working at Sony there, which Sony has a sort of notoriety to only give short-term contracts. So I worked for them, finished my first contract related to Blu-ray and then they dropped me. So from there, I went on to get my master's because I kind of got redirected there and I started teaching, which I absolutely love teaching. So I taught there until I finished my master's and then they made a deal that you can keep teaching and we'll give you a tenured position when you get your PhD. So I went on for my PhD, which I have completed. It's in technology management with an emphasis in digital communications. Unfortunately, about the time I finished, the university just kind of started losing money. And since I was the young guy in the department, I got dropped pretty early. But from there, I started off of LS eSports. So I started off as an independent tournament organizer. I was completely grassroots. So I did everything on my own. I had to do the promotions. I had to learn how to do the videos for it, which was a lot of effort. So I did that for about two years, starting off with League of Legends tournaments, moving to Valorant. We did a few other things along the way. But now we're still working on that a little more privately for other organizations now, but I'm also been developing myself as sort of an expert in the eSports field so I can do some consulting as well. That's terrific. And I'm sure many people can benefit from your expertise because you do have a significant amount. Today we are going to enjoy hearing what you have to say about streaming. And so tell us, when did streaming media begin? So a lot of streaming media is probably owed to YouTube because that was the first really large video platform. There have been a few others, but I mean, YouTube is the one that still survives today. So it's the one everyone remembers. Livestreaming probably has its best star in 2011 with Justin TV. Justin TV was literally just a live stream of some dude that just streamed what he was doing every day. And eventually it expanded into what is now called Twitch TV, which is arguably the biggest live streaming service alongside Twitch, YouTube and Facebook gaming are the three biggest ones in North America that are worth talking about at this point. But Twitch started initially as just gameplay. That was their main focus. But eventually as they grew and more people got on they started expanding and eventually they released what's now called the IRL content. So this is just chatting. These are people that can go on and they can talk about stuff. They can talk about their day. They can show the kind of art and stuff they're doing. And they probably, YouTube started up probably 2016 or 2017 with YouTube gaming and Facebook gaming has followed pretty closely. And both of those have actually done pretty well but largely Twitch is still the biggest competitor in that space based on almost all metrics except growth. If you look at growth, Facebook gaming is doing the best but Facebook gaming doesn't seem to have any interest in being exclusive to eSports content whereas Twitch and YouTube are actually fighting with each other quite a bit to be that like the ESPN of eSports that people are arguing for. Now it's really interesting because people who are not in the space probably they watch TV and really don't watch streaming of games or eSports probably don't really understand what that segment of the population is doing. So what is streaming media used for? Oh, it can be used for absolutely everything. In North America, livestreams related to video game content is really strong because that's where we started out. But if you look at like China for instance, China's live stream market is completely different from ours. theirs is only about 20% streaming, sorry, live streaming video games. The rest of it tends to be mostly young women streaming and the consumers of that are mostly young men but that's due to like limitations and like I'm gonna say demographics based on their communities. But right now if I were to pop up YouTube, Twitch, Facebook gaming, I could probably find somebody doing whatever I want. I could find someone playing my favorite game. I can find a competition and watch that live. Twitch had really great success with like chess content for a while. So I can go watch like chess grain masters play their games now. I could watch people talk about their day. I can talk to people that are painting, they're doing graphics design. I could probably find somebody on there that's doing some sort of woodshop project right now. So it's not just a great way to find and kind of communicate and network with people, but you can really learn a lot on those websites too if you know where to look. So why is streaming media important to us? So streaming media is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's a very easily inaccessible way to like grow yourself and to grow a brand. Assuming you have a computer that can do so in a microphone, which are really the two hardware requirements, I recommend a mic, but you don't have to. You could probably look up a YouTube video and have a live stream set up and running in about 30 minutes. It really doesn't take too much to do. Versus back in like the original Counter-Strike days, live streaming was just impossible. Right, when they actually recorded these, they had to record them on VHS tapes. So they had to go through the event, record on VHS, take it and make it digital, do all the editing there and then get it uploaded. That was the closest that was to like live streaming video games and it took a week to do. Now, pretty much anybody can do it. The hardware is not exclusive or as expensive it used to be. You don't have to necessarily have somebody with like a bachelor's in live streaming, which I don't believe actually exists. Anybody can kind of pick it up and it's pretty good. What, you know, where would eSports and gaming be without streaming? It's, oh God, it's hard to imagine it even now because it's so incorporated into everything related to gaming and streaming. You know, I think the original start for gaming specifically probably came from the let's play content. People like Markiplier, Japsepticeye, PewDiePie doing their original videos. And that was a really great start to people like building their communities and being seen as like as a brand. Now there's so much that's live streamed. You can find people that just play their games every day, but a lot of people end up getting like brand deals. Like most streamers that are really high end actually make the majority of their money from sponsorships. They don't make it through like gifts and donations and stuff anymore. They'll have these companies that are willing to pay them potentially tens of thousands of dollars just to play their video game online for an hour hoping that'll attract more of an audience to them. And of course with like tournaments and stuff we don't have to wait a week to find out what happened in Chinese League of Legends, right? I can go on and I can just watch it live. I may have trouble understanding some of it but I can watch their matches live. I can understand what their meds and communities are. There are ways for me to get engaged and to kind of grow because all of that's so live. I don't have to wait anymore. Now let's talk about the, you kind of mentioned brands and I think that's really important and sponsorships. Okay, we have pro players and of course they're gonna make money by playing in tournaments and hopefully winning prizes. However, are they spending all of their time playing in tournaments or are they getting some of their income by streaming? So the majority of it will probably come from sponsors which does not have to be live streaming. You could do YouTube videos for sponsors of course and that's how a lot of people, that's all they do. But for live streaming, yeah, there's actually there was an issue for the LCS which is the North American League of Legends where they actually lost a lot of players really suddenly because the players realized they can make a lot more money as a live streamer than they ever could as a professional athlete. So you're almost about the same time a lot of the really big and well-known figures for big teams like TSM and Dignitas all started dropping at the same time because there was just a lot more money to be made as a live streamer. And then you're not stuck under the rules that are like prohibited by your organization. Although even those professional organizations have changed organizations like again, Team Solo Mid or FaZe that used to be entirely competitive. Team Solo Mid was made to be like the number one League of Legends competitor in North America. But now they've signed on a bunch of people they would have probably never been considered five years ago because having this live stream content and talent to them is a huge asset. So that's why you can find people like GM Hukaru who's one of the highest ranked chess players in the world actually being signed on by a pro team like TSM. You can find people like QD Cinderella that does a lot of really creative and unique content but she's not really well-known for her gameplay but even a pro team sees a lot of great potential in her as an asset so they still hire her on now. And that's completely changed the way these organizations and brands are running. Do teams require their players to stream for a certain number of hours per day? That, so that depends on contracts. One of the big battles right now between Twitch and YouTube trying to kind of one up each other on who's on top is to exclude exclusivity on contracts. So there's an individual named Ludwig who I believe less than a week ago signed a contract to exclusively stream on YouTube. To my knowledge, he has never streamed on YouTube. He's always been primarily on Twitch but as part of those contracts, he does have to stream so many days a week for so many hours for so many years. There's another big streamer named Dacheray that does a lot of content. I believe she's the number one YouTube streamer. She originally mentioned that her contract actually ends in 200 streaming hours which tells us her contract isn't necessarily based on a hard date. It's based on the number of hours she streams per day which may mean she has some ability to actually accelerate the end of her contract if she wanted to really push out 10 hour days or something. But I don't know if that's something she's interested in and of course I'm only speculating on their contracts. Sure, you know, I'm in Hawaii and you're in Indiana. One of the issues that we have in Hawaii is latency and does latency play a role in streaming? A little bit but not too much. When you talk about like eSports and competitive gaming, it is a very big deal though. If I'm just talking to people live streaming like right now, I really can't tell any difference between like hearing your voice and seeing your lips move but if you're a competitive gamer and you're trying really quickly to like get your crosshairs on an opponent before they see and move to yours, that little bit of latency is a really big deal. That's why a lot of like competitive eSports has gotten away from teams. We saw like team houses. So teams might have a house in Texas and California and New York, but now there's latency issues. So now a lot of the teams have to be there in person, right? That's why we've even seen like legal leverages and Overwatch actually pre-throwing stadiums just for these types of events. And things have gone online because of COVID a little bit but largely latency is extremely important in competitive games. Even when I was running my independent tournaments which I couldn't offer very large prices that I've liked, players were extremely picky on which servers they'd be playing on because they wanted that very slight advantage even if it's just 10 or 20 milliseconds. Really, that makes a lot of sense. So with all of this streaming, who is watching? Nowadays pretty much everyone. It used to be a thing where it was only, well, primarily gamers that did that, but nowadays I really do believe anybody could load up Twitch or YouTube and find someone there that they would enjoy watching. Obviously people that enjoy video games are gonna be looking for the video game streamers. If you're really into like Final Fantasy 14, there's probably a hundred people speaking English that are streaming there right now. But even if you're just somebody who, maybe they just moved to a new area, they don't have a lot of friends or people to talk to, you can find streamers on there to talk to. And I'm not talking about some sort of paid service although you can like subscribe or donate to them. There's a lot of people on Twitch that really just want people to communicate. One of the things I do when I lay up the live stream on Twitch is I try to spend a lot of time actually doing research. So when I'm going through, I'm looking for like data-driven articles related to gaming, related about eSports to kind of understand where the community is and where things are growing. And I'll have people come into my chat all the time that they'll give like their insight to some of the statistics that I disagree with or I just surprise me. And then sometimes I'll find people that'll link me like another article and we'll go ahead and like read all that stuff together, which I think is pretty fun. Sure. So what are the benefits to the streaming platforms and apps to streaming? Do you mean the benefits to being a streamer or like the benefits of streaming on one site to another? Oh, I'm talking about the benefits to Twitch and YouTube. What do they get out of all of this? So there's actually a very funny argument that Twitch itself hasn't actually made money despite being alive for about 10-ish years now. They definitely have a lot of outgoing costs, especially with YouTube encroaching on them for exclusivity contracts. Those cost a lot of money. Facebook gaming, which is still establishing itself was willing to pay a really well-known figure named Disguised Toast 30 times what Twitch was offering because that potential to growth is so huge for them to bring on a big person like that. But a lot of these sites are gonna be making a lot of money and opportunities just through sponsorships and ads. You could look at like the Overwatch League, which actually had an exclusivity contract with Twitch and then a year later changed to an exclusivity contract with YouTube. And that's mutually beneficial because by working with those sites, they can get more people to watch their games. They can offer them in-game content just for being able to watch. If you like love Overwatch, there's only one new website you can go for the live stream content and that's pretty good for them. And as these businesses are expanding, there's other opportunities there as well. So for those who don't know, Twitch is actually owned by Amazon. They're almost owned by Microsoft, but they ended up picking Amazon instead. So when Amazon Game Studios releases their new games, there's a ton of stuff incentivizing streamers and viewers to go in and play their game. When they're offering, they're sort of cloud computing things like Luna, now that's all over their website, they naturally have gamers because it's a large part of their population to go in and try to redirect people. Twitch itself may not be making a lot of money, but the opportunities to sort of promote other content that might be there's or make ads from other people is absolutely huge. And it's been consistently growing quite a bit every year, even in COVID. So how does a person who wants to stream content decide whether to Twitch, I mean, to stream on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, how do you, how do you pick? I, okay, I could probably spend an hour on the differences for them, but we don't have that much time. There's benefits to both of them. Twitch is by far the best in terms of the biggest community. So if you just want to look at the number of viewers that are on a website, Twitch is your place to go to. However, Twitch's discoverability is exceptionally low because Twitch, Twitch wants to prop up the bigger streamers that have a lot. These are the people they're putting a lot of money into, so they want to make sure those people say them. As opposed to something like YouTube, which YouTube will naturally record and you put on their website everything that you livestream. I put all your live streams in one place, that puts all your videos in one place. So YouTube has much better, I'll say discoverability than the two of them, but if you're someone who's just very casual, if you're just kind of wanting to work on a project and maybe have some people to talk to, you're not trying to be the next best shrouder, ninja or whoever. Facebook gaming might actually be your best option because you can find live streams just browsing through Facebook. And that's really popular, especially for older generations that spend a lot more time on Facebook than younger generations will for Instagram, for instance. Now you did kind of reference data and kind of finding possibly information from the chats. Do you think brands can utilize chats on streaming in order to gain information that will help them connect with their target market? Yes. So that's one thing as a streamer, you can go in and I can see all my data alerts or at least most of them. I'm sure Amazon can see more than I can see, but I can see certain things like you can look at your age group, you can look at your demographic information, you can find all this stuff. And I'm sure Amazon has a lot more that they just don't publicly share. But it's actually really common for, like especially for like game releases, they will go out and find big streamers to just play their games for them. And that's gonna be based on your demographic information. If you're well known as like a professional chess player, well, they're probably not gonna come to you for like playing the new Marvel game that just came out. But they might go to somebody like Rothfogator who actually was well known for like professional Overwatch play and still plays a lot of video games to this day. So they would see like his viewer base is like demographic being a really great activation for their product. Sure. So what makes someone successful at streaming media? So the probably, I guess there's a few metrics you could look at, probably the best is your concurrent viewers. So if I hit my live stream button, how many people do I expect to stop by my stream in an hour? What's my highest peak number gonna be? Unfortunately, that's the hardest metric to get just because there's so many people doing it. It's really hard to actually like make yourself discovered. There are other metrics though, like you consider yourself very successful if you have a low viewer base, but maybe the viewer base that is there like donates a lot of money to you, maybe they could help you network in other ways. And you could kind of consider yourself successful on that. And then some people probably just stream because they absolutely love their craft and they just kind of want to share and get other people involved in those communities. Sure. So what do you think the future is for streaming media? So I expect things are gonna grow. I don't know if I expect another big competitor to come out. Twitch has been dominant in the market for so long. Even organizations like MLG tried to be competitive and failed, which is a tragic story. But like YouTube and Facebook are competitive because they have a ton of money they can just throw into it to almost automatically be competitive with Twitch. So I don't expect any other big competitors to show up. What I do think is going to happen, like I can use Riot Games as an example because Riot Games is one of the biggest esports like or biggest gaming companies that produces competitive games probably in the world at the moment. I do believe Riot Games in the next five years is probably gonna produce their own sort of live streaming service for their competitions not necessarily for everyone to use. But right now if you are a game dev and you wanna stream on Twitch, which you should it's great for your growth and community engagement. You're stuck to Twitch's rules. As far as ads you're limited on what you can get and Twitch is terrible for ad revenue regarding its partners. But with Riot Games if they develop their own live streaming platform for Valorant, for League of Legends, for Legends for Ter, all their games well now they have full control over who advertises. They have full control on when things are going who's gonna be on stream. They've got everything in their control. So I think as big companies sort of build up they're gonna build their own personal platforms for their competitions. But largely for like independent persons like me that might wanna stream I don't expect a whole lot's gonna necessarily change. For the biggest people like on top we're gonna see more and more competition for them to be exclusive to these bigger companies though. And YouTube and Twitch will probably still continue to fight over who gets to stream Blizzard games like the Overwatch League or the Call of Duty League which I believe Twitch and YouTube both paid almost $100 million for exclusivity for a few years. Even this is slightly off topic but Amazon which owns Twitch actually does have rights to Thursday night football now. So if you wanna watch Thursday night football that's on Amazon. Because it's on Amazon you know it's on Twitch because it's on Twitch. These individual partners that are really well known in the community like S-Fan are able to just watch all of it for free. They get to watch football on live stream they get to have their viewers there they get to provide, they get to be commentators which is probably a really fun experience for them. So we even see like traditional sports are starting to leak their way into some of the live streaming market and getting away from cable access. Do you foresee that streaming will look like it does today in the metaverse? Ooh. So some parts of it aren't gonna change but the way these communities reach out to its viewers and other people probably will change. There were plans in a recent Amazon game to do that and for some reason they pulled back on the idea but they didn't give a reason why. So for people that like play video games especially like social games, they can play it and if a player wants they can try to figure out where they are and find them. But for things like the metaverse where a lot more things tend to be connected I could really see a lot more accessibility for players being able to directly go in and play with the streamer they're finding. It'll be a lot easier to find like their account information and social games to figure out where their location is. And I think there will probably have to be a lot of benefits for both of them to make it a very symbiotic relationship. And I'm kind of wondering too is whether NFTs will play any role in terms of like transferring NFTs in that in the streaming sort of environment? Maybe. So as a few things to that there are certain games that are like the items you unlock themselves are actually NFTs and that's the way the like in-game market will actually like trade items. As far as streaming goes there actually are a few streamers that are actually starting to like make their own NFTs based on their community. I mentioned a lot of debate in the community recently about like the ethics of that and does Twitch technically own the rights to that kind of stuff as a streamer. And I don't know. I know there I'm trying to I can't remember her name but there's a VTuber recently who actually started selling NFTs of her own stream. And I'm sure she's made quite a bit of money off that already even though it's only been 24 or 48 hours. Oh, bad. So how has the pandemic impacted media streaming? Oh, it was actually fantastic. I know that's a little bit awful to say but people are stuck in their homes. They can't go out and work. There's not so much to do. So a lot of people just decided, hey, I really enjoy watching my favorite streamer XQC. I'm gonna start live streaming myself and playing the same games and kind of having the same personality or some people that aren't interested would find they found more time on YouTube. They found more time on Twitch, Facebook, whatever and they really had great discovery. Last year I think was the largest percentage of growth for all these companies. Twitch saw really good growth. YouTube almost doubled its audience, not quite. And I think Facebook almost tripled its audience all within one year just because people are sitting at home with not as much to do. This is great for their growth. So do you stream media? I do. Unfortunately, I'm not quite as popular as I'd like to be. I've done a few different things which is my own fault because usually once you start getting established you don't wanna restart. But when I was organizing tournaments I livestreamed all those. Not only because I thought it was fun but some of the players that actually competed wanted to be like professional athletes. So they wanted to be able to take like little snapshots of my stream to show them like getting a really cool move off into using their own highlight rules. So it made a lot of sense for me to livestream. Nowadays I tend to livestream usually noon lunch time-ish which I can spend the time either going through these articles and learning about different industries as I like or if I don't have a whole lot else to do I'll just load up one of my favorite games and play it with the people that are in chat. Okay, so if people want to find you Dr. Cyphers how can they do that? So probably the best two ways to find me or reach out to me would probably be finding me on my LinkedIn or Twitter. Unlike a lot of people I end up just using my real name for my handles on both. So you just go to Twitter slash link on Cyphers or whatever and find me there. As I said, I livestream almost every day. I think I take Sundays and Mondays off because various reasons on Sundays and Monday I like to actually leave my house and play Dungeons and Dragons. But yeah, you can find me live streaming every day from about 11 p.m. Eastern to 4 p.m. Eastern on my live stream which is Twitch.tv slash play on Cyphers. All right, thank you so much. We've learned a lot about media streaming today. Yeah, thanks for having me. I've had a great time. All right, so anyway, thank you to our viewers for joining us today. Next week my guest will be Ellen Zavian. We'll be discussing union matters in eSports. See you then.