The Rapid Growth and Fizzling Out of Online Streaming Companies

In 2011, several online streaming companies built up quickly with revenue coming in from YouTube and new exciting platforms. However, many of these companies fizzled out or exploded in a bad way only a few years later. This phenomenon is something to be aware of as the streaming bubble continues to grow.

One of the most successful streamers is Rooster Teeth, which grew rapidly but eventually faced financial difficulties. The company's rapid growth and failure serve as a cautionary tale for those considering starting an online streaming business. As the streaming industry continues to evolve, it's essential to be aware of the potential pitfalls and plan accordingly.

Focus on Product and Software

To avoid the pitfalls experienced by Rooster Teeth and other companies, focus on developing high-quality product and software that meets the needs of streamers. One example is Stream Elements, a platform that provides a unified codebase for overlays, workflow, and dynamic layouts. While StreamElements has received investment, it's essential to continue innovating and improving its features to stay ahead of the competition.

Purpose-Driven Content

The most successful streamers are creating purpose-driven content that resonates with their audience. This type of content can include game shows, narrative-driven streams, or other formats that offer a unique experience for viewers. By focusing on purpose-driven content, streamers can differentiate themselves and build a loyal following.

Building Software Components Around Stream Content

As the streaming industry continues to grow, software components will play an increasingly important role in enhancing the viewer experience. Companies like StreamElements are already building this type of technology, but there is still room for innovation. By focusing on purpose-driven content and developing software that complements it, streamers can create a seamless viewing experience.

The Role of Production Software

Production software will continue to play a crucial role in the streaming industry, particularly with the rise of interactive elements. While dedicated hardware may be necessary for certain applications, software will remain the primary tool for production. Companies like StreamElements are already building tools that simplify the production process and provide more flexibility for streamers.

The Future of Streaming Production

As the streaming industry continues to evolve, it's essential to think about what the future holds in terms of production software and hardware. While dedicated hardware may be necessary for certain applications, interactive elements will become increasingly important. Companies like Gear (NDI) are already making waves with their innovative products that simplify the capture card process.

Set Dressings and Interactive Elements

As streamers continue to experiment with new formats and interactive elements, set dressings and other production tools will become essential. The backlash from the community may be significant as these tools seem "dumb" or gimmicky at first, but they will ultimately prove valuable in enhancing the viewer experience.

Building a Production System

The author has been working on building a production system for over a year, slowly piecing together various components to solve specific problems. By brainstorming and experimenting with different solutions, streamers can identify areas where new tools or software can be developed to improve the viewing experience. Companies like Gear (NDI) are already providing innovative solutions that will become increasingly important in the streaming industry.

Building a Service-Based Model

As the streaming industry continues to grow, a service-based model is becoming more prominent. Instead of relying on hardware, companies will focus on software and consulting services to help streamers build and maintain their production systems. This shift will require a different approach from what has come before, but it holds great promise for streamers looking to improve their content.

Building Interactive Tools

Interactive tools will become increasingly important in the streaming industry as streamers look for ways to engage with their audience. By developing software that simplifies the creation and deployment of interactive elements, companies can help streamers build more immersive experiences. This will require a deep understanding of the technical aspects of production, but it holds great potential for innovation and growth.

Building the Future of Streaming

As the streaming industry continues to evolve, it's essential to think about what the future holds in terms of software, hardware, and interactive elements. By focusing on purpose-driven content, developing innovative software solutions, and building interactive tools, streamers can build a loyal following and create a seamless viewing experience for their audience.

Building Interactive Tools

Interactive tools will become increasingly important in the streaming industry as streamers look for ways to engage with their audience. The potential for innovation is vast, but it requires a deep understanding of the technical aspects of production.

The Role of Production Software

Production software will play an essential role in the streaming industry, particularly with the rise of interactive elements. While dedicated hardware may be necessary for certain applications, software will remain the primary tool for production.

StreamElements and Its Potential

StreamElements is already building innovative software solutions that are making waves in the streaming community. By focusing on providing a unified codebase for overlays, workflow, and dynamic layouts, StreamElements has established itself as a leader in the industry. However, there is still room for innovation and improvement to stay ahead of the competition.

The Potential for Interactive Elements

Interactive elements will become increasingly important in the streaming industry as streamers look for ways to engage with their audience. By developing software that simplifies the creation and deployment of interactive elements, companies can help streamers build more immersive experiences.

Focus on Quality and Innovation

To avoid the pitfalls experienced by Rooster Teeth and other companies, focus on developing high-quality product and software that meets the needs of streamers. One example is StreamElements, a platform that provides a unified codebase for overlays, workflow, and dynamic layouts. By focusing on quality and innovation, streamers can build a loyal following and create a seamless viewing experience for their audience.

Building a Production System

The author has been working on building a production system for over a year, slowly piecing together various components to solve specific problems. By brainstorming and experimenting with different solutions, streamers can identify areas where new tools or software can be developed to improve the viewing experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eni want to have a chat about streaming gear for a moment based on a comment from francisco aguilar here the question is epos do you think that streaming gear has plateaued or is close to i try to think of how much more companies can innovate and i'm struggling because i feel like they hit all the right notes for us creators and then they follow up by saying in all seriousness elgato has led the movement and streamlining and other companies have kind of you know followed in their tracks but how does that i guess allow for the for competition so there are two things i want to discuss in this conversation has streaming gear plateaued i'm going to say that the answer is mostly yes but but also no so the issue is that it comes down to what problems there are to solve if we think about the core problems that needed solving or streaming to be possible or doable or viable or independent creators we needed things like affordable cameras that were high enough quality to broadcast and connect with our audience ways to capture and stream our gameplay without massive performance impacts or expensive computers we needed ways to have alerts and interactivity with our audience things like that all of the core problems that needed solving from basically taking what was 10 years ago mostly broadcast and enterprise gear and making it more accessible on the consumer side most of those problems have been solved there's still going to be smaller problems within that to be solved for example you can get into the nuance of well now we need hdmi 2.1 capture cards we need capture cards with g-sync we need capture cards with this and that and that's fine but the core problem has been solved we have reached the point of diminishing returns where 99 of people have what they need available i think there's going to continue to be problems to solve and there's still going to be new exciting gear and the formats are going to keep changing for example as i just talked about in my video that went live yesterday at the time of recording or streaming this av1 the open stream video encoding codec that is going to be super high quality that is just around the corner in terms of like streaming it to twitch twitch has been heavily invested on making it happen we can finally record with it in obs studio and we are reaching the point where the demand for encoders is here it's going to be coming soon so then that's going to be a new generation of gear where we start seeing the evolution of new codex and we haven't really seen an like a kodak paradigm shift in like 15 or 20 years because avc or h.264 has taken over and all the successors to it have been way too licensed up and all of that and patented and everything so that it wasn't really reasonable to use like there are plenty of streaming sites that still can't use h.265 it's just it's a whole mess so we're gonna see gear in that category take off we're gonna see more advanced like i think we're gonna see a lot more kind of unified workflow tools like the roland video switcher i showed which is not a new concept video mixers have been a thing for since the down to time for broadcasts and things like that but to have them on a more accessible level for more indie streaming kind of stuff is going to be really really exciting and i think we're going to see more products in those categories but i think what we're going to see in terms of the next stage of innovations it's mostly going to be companies kind of locking down on their ecosystems like elgato was the first one to go the whole apple ecosystem route and they're doing you know once once the stream deck came out it was kind of game over for a lot of market share in terms of people being like okay well now i have the stream deck it works with everything and so the stream deck controls my lights it controls my camera i can control my capture card it can control all this and so elgato continues to release new things that feed into that ecosystem we're starting to see avermedia kind of jump into that ecosystem and i think more companies are going to do it razer's kind of doing it with the synapse stuff but that's the worst part of their products so take it or leave it but i still think there's there's room for competition because there's just always the need for competition like right now there are a lot of people who just don't want to buy elgato products because either they've had a bad experience with them they don't like their marketing they just don't want to deal with them and so they'll go with avermedia there's a lot of people who feel avermedia is just like a knockoff elgato brand even though avermedia's been around longer and they prefer to go with elgato or they want the ecosystem and things like that and we're going to start seeing a lot more cheaper products my most popular gear coverage videos recently have not been the elgato products or the expensive microphones or the fancy stuff it's been the five dollar capture card and the 20 webcams and things like that so we're gonna see a lot more push for affordable and cheaper capture cards as the people try to drive the bottom line down more and more while the better known companies are gonna innovate in the more kind of expensive and niche feature set places like we still need displayport capture cards things like that now this came up this company stream is streamlify stream fluff whatever i came up in my discord server because they are basically trying to offer their own ecosystem of streaming products right out of the gate so they're coming out of the gate with three four different products that very much look like you know this looks like the ever media pw313 it's a 1080p 60 webcam crystal clear video quality big doubt on that one rgb microphone a ring light for a phone for some reason and then a standing green screen that's going to be a knockoff of the elgato or the newer one but we're gonna see a lot more companies like this pop up where it's just gonna be focused on the cheaper stuff and things like that these el cheapo companies are gonna be massive in this space yeah i mean that's that's the thing is like it's hard to describe because they're so i'm breaking out the yellow pad i'm breaking out the yellow pad we're doing since we're doing this live we got a legal pad i'm gonna draw some circles okay so we got three circles i know it looks like a butt in the the the innermost circle are the top one percent of streamers the people who are full-time streamers who if some 3000 capture card comes out that solves like one percent of their problems they're gonna buy it they have all the gear they have everything they could ever need and most of it's delivered free from the companies and it's fine then this second much bigger circle is streamers these are just streamers in general people who live for twitch or youtube or whatever you know they live and die by the drama the information everything that goes on the people who are core involved in streamer culture and then the outer circle is just people who want to stream just people gamers educators random people they're just people who want to stream this massive circle is the people who buy the majority of the products but they don't buy the expensive stuff they buy stuff from these el cheapo companies and these random no-name companies that the core circle i've never heard of are going to be the people who are buying their streaming gear at walmart or best buy are going to have heard of so these companies take off with the outer circle whereas the inner circle like you only use elgato or ever media if you're a real streamer and then the inner circle who doesn't care at all what gear they stream with because they have the best gear and they don't think about it and so that's where these people are gonna go with someone said it's funny calling uh new something a newer knockoff because its products are also knockoffs yes the the amusing thing is though is even when newer knocks something off it's usually they're the first one to like start up the factory or whatever with the patentless design and then they're the ones who other clone companies end up cloning off of it's kind of funny the flood of crappy products is gonna suck but if it drives down elgato's prices it's gonna be good for anyone so basically they're faster in reverse engineering yeah that's like newer's entire business model honestly i don't think the flood of crappy products sucks it sucks from like a perspective of the reviewer like of me trying to sort through it all and getting requests to review every single five dollar ten dollar webcam or capture card and i just logistically can't keep up with it and most of them are crap and it's hard for me to care about them and it's i can't market videos on them because they're all like i got so many requests so here oh hold on hold on if i could give everyone what they wanted every single one of these capture cards which is very clearly just the can't link rebadged and rehoused over and over and over i'd make a video on but i literally cannot conjure up enough titles and thumbnails and reasons for a viewer to care to just keep covering every single one of these because they're the same capture card with some minor differences in latency and supported specs and whether it screws up the audio and turns it into mono whether it lies to you about 4k or not whether it lies to you about being usb 3 or not i just can't it's impossible it would be terrible even though it was one of my best performing videos over the last couple years i can't just keep making the same video over and over because i have tried replicating that video success it doesn't really work it was a right time right place kind of thing some are rebrands some are knockoffs some are the original that someone else were badged there are clones of clones of clones of clones so that part sucks but the fact is that you can walk into walmart or amazon you can't walk into amazon but you know go into random stores and find these on the shelves now is incredible it's no longer hey i want to use a camera to do a broadcast for a school event or whatever what do you recommend and i have to go how much time do you have here you need this list of super technical things that you don't need to do it's literally hdmi into this plug this in turn on zoom you're good to go that's incredible it's just a lot to sort through and then people want to get the best and they ask me what the best is and either they can't afford the best or they don't want to hear the explanation of why it's the best and then suddenly they don't care anymore and they just buy what their favorite streamer recommended anyway and i'm like why the hell did you ask me this video is brought to you by riverside.fm my new favorite podcast and video recording platform and what i will be using for future episodes of my behind the streams podcast riverside.fm is used by garyvee guyraz spotify disney and many more creators it records audio and video locally on each participant's device and uploads these local files automatically to the riverside dashboard and ooh man the recordings look like they came straight out of camera which is bonkers and a huge step up from what i was previously using no more coordinating recording with your guests or anything like that as it's all really done for them you can receive separate audio in uncompressed 48 kilohertz wave and video up to 4k tracks for all participants and by all i mean all up to eight co-hosts or guests are allowed which is wild riverside uses progressive uploading so that uploads while the show goes on so you can download your files within seconds of hitting stop record with the magic editor you can save hours of editing work with a few clicks change your size positioning backgrounds layouts add a logo and more plus you can export the video ready to upload to video sites and download a transcription in seconds as well guests can even join from ipad and iphone too did i forget to mention the cool part riverside.fm is also a streaming tool meaning that while you're recording you can also live stream to most major platforms which is pretty neat but streaming does not get in the way of recording it is a recording first platform with quality as its focus which i can really appreciate plans start from just seven dollars and fifty cents per month go to riverside fm eposvox and use code equals fox to get 15 off a plan today but yes so i agree that we're gonna actually i don't agree so but his second point about you know elgato kind of leading the charge and avermedia and razer kind of going a little bit behind and things like that is mostly true but at the same time we're seeing so many more companies that are big companies that don't do streaming getting into streaming products and actually doing it decently the avermedia capture card was great evga has been pumping out great capture cards this is the xr1 pro they just announced my review of that should hopefully be up monday if i ever shoot b-roll and finish editing it like i think we're gonna see some competition in those kinds of spaces it's just a matter of how much it matters because we've also seen companies like say hyperx who started doing goofy stuff or like even i think it was asus that released the deodorant mic at first like their first iterations into this more gamery gear kind of flopped and so there's a lot that could go wrong at the same time i don't think there's little room for innovation but innovation can really can really only go as fast as this practical keep up with the technology yeah so like the speed of innovation is definitely going to slow down because it was like i drew three lines again you can't see this it doesn't matter but i like drawing examples and i don't have an easy way to do that on a mouse without it looking absolutely dogged here so this is where home streaming was in 2011. absolute trash all we had was gameplay and music and adobe flash media encoder or a pirated copy of wirecast and played call of duty 4 to some radio rock music and like it was fun it seemed like it was the cool new thing but it wasn't great at the time this is where broadcast was cameras productions assistance etc so there was a massive leap to be had to go from where it was to where broadcast was and now up a little bit more to where everything has kind of normalized today but then that curve is not going to continue to be steep there's nowhere else to really go other than in production value so i think the next bubble if we call it a bubble uh it's not something that pops so i don't know that bubble's the right word but the next wave the next big thing with streaming is going to be on the production side and i'm really nervous to say this because this has already gone terribly wrong on youtube but like we got the gear side down and that side like those companies are going to continue to make new things and exciting things and be profitable and surely someone will have good ideas like on lens teleprompters that coordinate with your streaming software and all sorts of little stuff but i think the next big like companies or you know people that are going to come up with exciting things are going to be on the production side on producing good shows on building out a media empire so to speak where you have a consistent production from a live stream to a video series to a tick tock to whatever to do the kind of unified things that a lot of streamers do but not all of them a lot of them really struggle with that and to just produce better and higher produced content now i said i'm nervous about that because that leads into the rabbit hole of where the previous round of youtube gaming production houses went which was the mcns machinima respawn rooster teeth like all these companies built up really really quickly back in 2011 with all of this money coming in from youtube and this new exciting thing and then fizzled out or like exploded in a bad way only a few years later and i don't want to see that happening with the streaming bubble just leading the new charge but i do think that's where the innovation's gonna kind of come in for a little bit so you're saying i need to launch a company that focus on product gear sword production value yeah software like i think right now the most underrated piece of software for your stream is stream elements and i feel ridiculous saying that they're not paying me they've never paid me a dollar i don't owe them anything but to have this unified code free although you can code your stuff if you want to workflow where you can use you know all of these overlays that interact with each other and do all these advanced things that you can then send to any copy of obs is pretty crazy i think something like that where you have the flexibility of building really dynamic and changing layouts and all of that stuff like that is the future that is what streamlabs wanted to be and then they fell down the money hole of oh well we can just release generic layouts and charge money for it and they kind of flopped with it that's what streamlabs wanted to be stream elements is kind of doing it i don't know that they're really like if i was them and i had like an influx of cash or investments or whatever like i would be putting more money into figuring out how to put together these more crazy layouts and make them more accessible to streamers while also making them different and i think it needs to focus around purpose-driven content and that's where the market is going right now anyway is purpose-driven content some of the most successful streamers are doing things like hosting specific game shows and you know having these specific narrative things to tell a story and have a purpose and obviously you still need your casual just chatting streams or whatever but i think for the core part effectively like if you think about like a sports broadcast a broadcast of the super bowl you have like two or three hours of pre-show radio or espn commentary or whatever and then you have the thing and then you have the halftime show and then you have the thing and then you have the after the fact thing that is effectively what a stream is you have your core thing that you're gonna make a video about and make into a big production in the middle and at the ends are just the casual chatting with you all playing a game whatever and i think building more software components around that are going to be the next step so i think stream elements is hitting at home with that right now i think atom which is a plug-in revamp of obs studio built by mr gregel's the drum streamer i interviewed and his team that thing does crazy like it controls your lights it controls dmx it controls like everything and it's been too much to wrap my head around just yet and then stuff like streamer bot like i think that stuff is the future but making it to where it's much more accessible or at least we have consultants who pre-build this stuff like production assistance or something like that i think that's where things are going do you think production stuff will lean more towards dedicated hardware or software for existing pcs i think it's going to be software i think it's going to be service based for the most part i think there's going to be hardware to assist in that like i said teleprompters whiteboards of some sort like interactive things i think like and they're gonna seem dumb the backlash from the community is gonna be big because it's gonna seem like widgets or dumb gimmicky things but i think kind of interactive things are gonna be big um and then i think it's just gonna be a matter of like set dressings like what can we build a set at out of how can we build a multi-cam scenario i don't know if you all were hanging out in the discord when we talked about bb jess's stream where she has a whole bunch of camera setting up that's what i'm working towards now like as i'm building out i've been building this all year since i moved in at the end of 2020 so for over a year now i've been slowly piecing this together but i've been trying to brainstorm like what are the pieces that would solve problems i have that could actually turn into tangible products and i think gear ironically enough they're not paying me to say this although clearly they have sent me things uh but gear like the ndi stuff from bird dog also represents kind of the future because we need all this stuff to kind of go to one place and not just rely on buying a whole bunch of capture cards and things like thati want to have a chat about streaming gear for a moment based on a comment from francisco aguilar here the question is epos do you think that streaming gear has plateaued or is close to i try to think of how much more companies can innovate and i'm struggling because i feel like they hit all the right notes for us creators and then they follow up by saying in all seriousness elgato has led the movement and streamlining and other companies have kind of you know followed in their tracks but how does that i guess allow for the for competition so there are two things i want to discuss in this conversation has streaming gear plateaued i'm going to say that the answer is mostly yes but but also no so the issue is that it comes down to what problems there are to solve if we think about the core problems that needed solving or streaming to be possible or doable or viable or independent creators we needed things like affordable cameras that were high enough quality to broadcast and connect with our audience ways to capture and stream our gameplay without massive performance impacts or expensive computers we needed ways to have alerts and interactivity with our audience things like that all of the core problems that needed solving from basically taking what was 10 years ago mostly broadcast and enterprise gear and making it more accessible on the consumer side most of those problems have been solved there's still going to be smaller problems within that to be solved for example you can get into the nuance of well now we need hdmi 2.1 capture cards we need capture cards with g-sync we need capture cards with this and that and that's fine but the core problem has been solved we have reached the point of diminishing returns where 99 of people have what they need available i think there's going to continue to be problems to solve and there's still going to be new exciting gear and the formats are going to keep changing for example as i just talked about in my video that went live yesterday at the time of recording or streaming this av1 the open stream video encoding codec that is going to be super high quality that is just around the corner in terms of like streaming it to twitch twitch has been heavily invested on making it happen we can finally record with it in obs studio and we are reaching the point where the demand for encoders is here it's going to be coming soon so then that's going to be a new generation of gear where we start seeing the evolution of new codex and we haven't really seen an like a kodak paradigm shift in like 15 or 20 years because avc or h.264 has taken over and all the successors to it have been way too licensed up and all of that and patented and everything so that it wasn't really reasonable to use like there are plenty of streaming sites that still can't use h.265 it's just it's a whole mess so we're gonna see gear in that category take off we're gonna see more advanced like i think we're gonna see a lot more kind of unified workflow tools like the roland video switcher i showed which is not a new concept video mixers have been a thing for since the down to time for broadcasts and things like that but to have them on a more accessible level for more indie streaming kind of stuff is going to be really really exciting and i think we're going to see more products in those categories but i think what we're going to see in terms of the next stage of innovations it's mostly going to be companies kind of locking down on their ecosystems like elgato was the first one to go the whole apple ecosystem route and they're doing you know once once the stream deck came out it was kind of game over for a lot of market share in terms of people being like okay well now i have the stream deck it works with everything and so the stream deck controls my lights it controls my camera i can control my capture card it can control all this and so elgato continues to release new things that feed into that ecosystem we're starting to see avermedia kind of jump into that ecosystem and i think more companies are going to do it razer's kind of doing it with the synapse stuff but that's the worst part of their products so take it or leave it but i still think there's there's room for competition because there's just always the need for competition like right now there are a lot of people who just don't want to buy elgato products because either they've had a bad experience with them they don't like their marketing they just don't want to deal with them and so they'll go with avermedia there's a lot of people who feel avermedia is just like a knockoff elgato brand even though avermedia's been around longer and they prefer to go with elgato or they want the ecosystem and things like that and we're going to start seeing a lot more cheaper products my most popular gear coverage videos recently have not been the elgato products or the expensive microphones or the fancy stuff it's been the five dollar capture card and the 20 webcams and things like that so we're gonna see a lot more push for affordable and cheaper capture cards as the people try to drive the bottom line down more and more while the better known companies are gonna innovate in the more kind of expensive and niche feature set places like we still need displayport capture cards things like that now this came up this company stream is streamlify stream fluff whatever i came up in my discord server because they are basically trying to offer their own ecosystem of streaming products right out of the gate so they're coming out of the gate with three four different products that very much look like you know this looks like the ever media pw313 it's a 1080p 60 webcam crystal clear video quality big doubt on that one rgb microphone a ring light for a phone for some reason and then a standing green screen that's going to be a knockoff of the elgato or the newer one but we're gonna see a lot more companies like this pop up where it's just gonna be focused on the cheaper stuff and things like that these el cheapo companies are gonna be massive in this space yeah i mean that's that's the thing is like it's hard to describe because they're so i'm breaking out the yellow pad i'm breaking out the yellow pad we're doing since we're doing this live we got a legal pad i'm gonna draw some circles okay so we got three circles i know it looks like a butt in the the the innermost circle are the top one percent of streamers the people who are full-time streamers who if some 3000 capture card comes out that solves like one percent of their problems they're gonna buy it they have all the gear they have everything they could ever need and most of it's delivered free from the companies and it's fine then this second much bigger circle is streamers these are just streamers in general people who live for twitch or youtube or whatever you know they live and die by the drama the information everything that goes on the people who are core involved in streamer culture and then the outer circle is just people who want to stream just people gamers educators random people they're just people who want to stream this massive circle is the people who buy the majority of the products but they don't buy the expensive stuff they buy stuff from these el cheapo companies and these random no-name companies that the core circle i've never heard of are going to be the people who are buying their streaming gear at walmart or best buy are going to have heard of so these companies take off with the outer circle whereas the inner circle like you only use elgato or ever media if you're a real streamer and then the inner circle who doesn't care at all what gear they stream with because they have the best gear and they don't think about it and so that's where these people are gonna go with someone said it's funny calling uh new something a newer knockoff because its products are also knockoffs yes the the amusing thing is though is even when newer knocks something off it's usually they're the first one to like start up the factory or whatever with the patentless design and then they're the ones who other clone companies end up cloning off of it's kind of funny the flood of crappy products is gonna suck but if it drives down elgato's prices it's gonna be good for anyone so basically they're faster in reverse engineering yeah that's like newer's entire business model honestly i don't think the flood of crappy products sucks it sucks from like a perspective of the reviewer like of me trying to sort through it all and getting requests to review every single five dollar ten dollar webcam or capture card and i just logistically can't keep up with it and most of them are crap and it's hard for me to care about them and it's i can't market videos on them because they're all like i got so many requests so here oh hold on hold on if i could give everyone what they wanted every single one of these capture cards which is very clearly just the can't link rebadged and rehoused over and over and over i'd make a video on but i literally cannot conjure up enough titles and thumbnails and reasons for a viewer to care to just keep covering every single one of these because they're the same capture card with some minor differences in latency and supported specs and whether it screws up the audio and turns it into mono whether it lies to you about 4k or not whether it lies to you about being usb 3 or not i just can't it's impossible it would be terrible even though it was one of my best performing videos over the last couple years i can't just keep making the same video over and over because i have tried replicating that video success it doesn't really work it was a right time right place kind of thing some are rebrands some are knockoffs some are the original that someone else were badged there are clones of clones of clones of clones so that part sucks but the fact is that you can walk into walmart or amazon you can't walk into amazon but you know go into random stores and find these on the shelves now is incredible it's no longer hey i want to use a camera to do a broadcast for a school event or whatever what do you recommend and i have to go how much time do you have here you need this list of super technical things that you don't need to do it's literally hdmi into this plug this in turn on zoom you're good to go that's incredible it's just a lot to sort through and then people want to get the best and they ask me what the best is and either they can't afford the best or they don't want to hear the explanation of why it's the best and then suddenly they don't care anymore and they just buy what their favorite streamer recommended anyway and i'm like why the hell did you ask me this video is brought to you by riverside.fm my new favorite podcast and video recording platform and what i will be using for future episodes of my behind the streams podcast riverside.fm is used by garyvee guyraz spotify disney and many more creators it records audio and video locally on each participant's device and uploads these local files automatically to the riverside dashboard and ooh man the recordings look like they came straight out of camera which is bonkers and a huge step up from what i was previously using no more coordinating recording with your guests or anything like that as it's all really done for them you can receive separate audio in uncompressed 48 kilohertz wave and video up to 4k tracks for all participants and by all i mean all up to eight co-hosts or guests are allowed which is wild riverside uses progressive uploading so that uploads while the show goes on so you can download your files within seconds of hitting stop record with the magic editor you can save hours of editing work with a few clicks change your size positioning backgrounds layouts add a logo and more plus you can export the video ready to upload to video sites and download a transcription in seconds as well guests can even join from ipad and iphone too did i forget to mention the cool part riverside.fm is also a streaming tool meaning that while you're recording you can also live stream to most major platforms which is pretty neat but streaming does not get in the way of recording it is a recording first platform with quality as its focus which i can really appreciate plans start from just seven dollars and fifty cents per month go to riverside fm eposvox and use code equals fox to get 15 off a plan today but yes so i agree that we're gonna actually i don't agree so but his second point about you know elgato kind of leading the charge and avermedia and razer kind of going a little bit behind and things like that is mostly true but at the same time we're seeing so many more companies that are big companies that don't do streaming getting into streaming products and actually doing it decently the avermedia capture card was great evga has been pumping out great capture cards this is the xr1 pro they just announced my review of that should hopefully be up monday if i ever shoot b-roll and finish editing it like i think we're gonna see some competition in those kinds of spaces it's just a matter of how much it matters because we've also seen companies like say hyperx who started doing goofy stuff or like even i think it was asus that released the deodorant mic at first like their first iterations into this more gamery gear kind of flopped and so there's a lot that could go wrong at the same time i don't think there's little room for innovation but innovation can really can really only go as fast as this practical keep up with the technology yeah so like the speed of innovation is definitely going to slow down because it was like i drew three lines again you can't see this it doesn't matter but i like drawing examples and i don't have an easy way to do that on a mouse without it looking absolutely dogged here so this is where home streaming was in 2011. absolute trash all we had was gameplay and music and adobe flash media encoder or a pirated copy of wirecast and played call of duty 4 to some radio rock music and like it was fun it seemed like it was the cool new thing but it wasn't great at the time this is where broadcast was cameras productions assistance etc so there was a massive leap to be had to go from where it was to where broadcast was and now up a little bit more to where everything has kind of normalized today but then that curve is not going to continue to be steep there's nowhere else to really go other than in production value so i think the next bubble if we call it a bubble uh it's not something that pops so i don't know that bubble's the right word but the next wave the next big thing with streaming is going to be on the production side and i'm really nervous to say this because this has already gone terribly wrong on youtube but like we got the gear side down and that side like those companies are going to continue to make new things and exciting things and be profitable and surely someone will have good ideas like on lens teleprompters that coordinate with your streaming software and all sorts of little stuff but i think the next big like companies or you know people that are going to come up with exciting things are going to be on the production side on producing good shows on building out a media empire so to speak where you have a consistent production from a live stream to a video series to a tick tock to whatever to do the kind of unified things that a lot of streamers do but not all of them a lot of them really struggle with that and to just produce better and higher produced content now i said i'm nervous about that because that leads into the rabbit hole of where the previous round of youtube gaming production houses went which was the mcns machinima respawn rooster teeth like all these companies built up really really quickly back in 2011 with all of this money coming in from youtube and this new exciting thing and then fizzled out or like exploded in a bad way only a few years later and i don't want to see that happening with the streaming bubble just leading the new charge but i do think that's where the innovation's gonna kind of come in for a little bit so you're saying i need to launch a company that focus on product gear sword production value yeah software like i think right now the most underrated piece of software for your stream is stream elements and i feel ridiculous saying that they're not paying me they've never paid me a dollar i don't owe them anything but to have this unified code free although you can code your stuff if you want to workflow where you can use you know all of these overlays that interact with each other and do all these advanced things that you can then send to any copy of obs is pretty crazy i think something like that where you have the flexibility of building really dynamic and changing layouts and all of that stuff like that is the future that is what streamlabs wanted to be and then they fell down the money hole of oh well we can just release generic layouts and charge money for it and they kind of flopped with it that's what streamlabs wanted to be stream elements is kind of doing it i don't know that they're really like if i was them and i had like an influx of cash or investments or whatever like i would be putting more money into figuring out how to put together these more crazy layouts and make them more accessible to streamers while also making them different and i think it needs to focus around purpose-driven content and that's where the market is going right now anyway is purpose-driven content some of the most successful streamers are doing things like hosting specific game shows and you know having these specific narrative things to tell a story and have a purpose and obviously you still need your casual just chatting streams or whatever but i think for the core part effectively like if you think about like a sports broadcast a broadcast of the super bowl you have like two or three hours of pre-show radio or espn commentary or whatever and then you have the thing and then you have the halftime show and then you have the thing and then you have the after the fact thing that is effectively what a stream is you have your core thing that you're gonna make a video about and make into a big production in the middle and at the ends are just the casual chatting with you all playing a game whatever and i think building more software components around that are going to be the next step so i think stream elements is hitting at home with that right now i think atom which is a plug-in revamp of obs studio built by mr gregel's the drum streamer i interviewed and his team that thing does crazy like it controls your lights it controls dmx it controls like everything and it's been too much to wrap my head around just yet and then stuff like streamer bot like i think that stuff is the future but making it to where it's much more accessible or at least we have consultants who pre-build this stuff like production assistance or something like that i think that's where things are going do you think production stuff will lean more towards dedicated hardware or software for existing pcs i think it's going to be software i think it's going to be service based for the most part i think there's going to be hardware to assist in that like i said teleprompters whiteboards of some sort like interactive things i think like and they're gonna seem dumb the backlash from the community is gonna be big because it's gonna seem like widgets or dumb gimmicky things but i think kind of interactive things are gonna be big um and then i think it's just gonna be a matter of like set dressings like what can we build a set at out of how can we build a multi-cam scenario i don't know if you all were hanging out in the discord when we talked about bb jess's stream where she has a whole bunch of camera setting up that's what i'm working towards now like as i'm building out i've been building this all year since i moved in at the end of 2020 so for over a year now i've been slowly piecing this together but i've been trying to brainstorm like what are the pieces that would solve problems i have that could actually turn into tangible products and i think gear ironically enough they're not paying me to say this although clearly they have sent me things uh but gear like the ndi stuff from bird dog also represents kind of the future because we need all this stuff to kind of go to one place and not just rely on buying a whole bunch of capture cards and things like that\n"