Would you have paid for a live stream for the World Championships?

Blackjack

Blackjack

Illuminati Blacksmack
Silver Member
I would have definitely purchased a live stream that was designed just like the Euro Championships (which was just awesome)...

I figured that Charlie could have charged $20 - $30 for people to watch - or even $10 a day. DP would have easily had a nice return on the investment.

David did a fantastic job with the updates, but its just not the same. I think that live streaming is the wave of the future, and if the smaller tours can provide this for the fans, why can't Dragon Promotions?

It just seems a bit odd that a live stream wasn't planned. Not everybody can take a week off and travel to NJ to watch the matches - but most everybody all over the world (perhaps hundreds of people) would pay $20-$30 to watch online. I believe that it would have been a smart move to take advantage of the interest fans have in this event. I believe DP could have made $10K easily by providing a live stream for the fans.

If you agree, respond here and let them know. If Charlie sees that there is an interest in it, perhaps he will consider it next year.
 
Yes !

I would pay $20 for live score updates for the whole week !

I would also pay for some live streaming matches .
 
Blackjack said:
I would have definitely purchased a live stream that was designed just like the Euro Championships (which was just awesome)...

I figured that Charlie could have charged $20 - $30 for people to watch - or even $10 a day. DP would have easily had a nice return on the investment.

David did a fantastic job with the updates, but its just not the same. I think that live streaming is the wave of the future, and if the smaller tours can provide this for the fans, why can't Dragon Promotions?

It just seems a bit odd that a live stream wasn't planned. Not everybody can take a week off and travel to NJ to watch the matches - but most everybody all over the world (perhaps hundreds of people) would pay $20-$30 to watch online. I believe that it would have been a smart move to take advantage of the interest fans have in this event. I believe DP could have made $10K easily by providing a live stream for the fans.

If you agree, respond here and let them know. If Charlie sees that there is an interest in it, perhaps he will consider it next year.
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Blackjack:

Absolutely yes! I would definitely have purchased a live stream for these 14.1 World Championships. The prices you mentioned sound reasonable to me (i.e. $20 - $30 for the whole kit/kaboodle, or $10/day -- however, this latter one might be on the high side, IMHO).

One other thing to consider would be another source of revenue to help pay for the setup of the streaming (the costs of which are not insignificant). Perhaps even offering some of the onsite memorabilia (T-shirts, et al.) for sale on the website for those that could not attend in person, perhaps even offering a merchandise discount for those that purchased the live stream? (This discount would be incentive to purchase the stream, and vice-versa. Technology-wise, this latter idea is a no-brainer -- the login IDs created for the stream "automatically" get the discount applied when logging in to the e-store. And, in the case of carrying these IDs forward to subsequent tournaments [i.e. the user IDs are persistent to the sponsoring company's website itself, not just "temporary" IDs for that particular tournament or stream], those IDs that purchased the stream for that tournament get the discounts applied for that tournament's/championships' merchandise. This is quite easily done in SQL [databases]; I know, for I'm in this line of work. ;-) )

Hope these are helpful ideas,
Sean
 
Yep, definitly. Maybe even some system like the IPT is using, where you can watch the matches at a different time.
 
Blackjack said:
I would have definitely purchased a live stream that was designed just like the Euro Championships (which was just awesome)...

I figured that Charlie could have charged $20 - $30 for people to watch - or even $10 a day. DP would have easily had a nice return on the investment.

David did a fantastic job with the updates, but its just not the same. I think that live streaming is the wave of the future, and if the smaller tours can provide this for the fans, why can't Dragon Promotions?

It just seems a bit odd that a live stream wasn't planned. Not everybody can take a week off and travel to NJ to watch the matches - but most everybody all over the world (perhaps hundreds of people) would pay $20-$30 to watch online. I believe that it would have been a smart move to take advantage of the interest fans have in this event. I believe DP could have made $10K easily by providing a live stream for the fans.

If you agree, respond here and let them know. If Charlie sees that there is an interest in it, perhaps he will consider it next year.
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I agree. It would have been nice to have these matches recorded for live streaming and maybe video sale later.Lots of good stuff no one will ever see.

I spoke with Pat Fleming who was here yesterday. He's very excited about his video venture into straight pool next week with live streaming and dvd.
 
dmgwalsh said:
I agree. It would have been nice to have these matches recorded for live streaming and maybe video sale later.Lots of good stuff no one will ever see.

I spoke with Pat Fleming who was here yesterday. He's very excited about his video venture into straight pool next week with live streaming and dvd.
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I am excited to see what he has to offer as far as live streaming,I am sure he will do well with it and I wish him the best of luck. :smile:
 
I would have purchased live streaming, but I think a one-time $40 for the whole event would have been good, or $10 for a day.

I really hope there will be DVDs like the past championships.
 
I think they lost DVD sale possibilites for sure.

Streaming video would have gotten some sales too. Most people would have been happy with a video stream and no commentary, that would have kept the cost down. No doubt, I like good live commentary, good being the key word.

Future Tourneys - I would like to see events with live streams one per table. Free or nominal cost. But the stream purchasers would have archive rights for a year as many good matches run at the same time live.

Sale season passes so all streams can be viewed by the season pass holder. One time annual fee.

One featured table with a web cam and free stream would have kept alot of eyes on Dragon Promotions for the time of the tourney. They are doing it in AZ the last few weeks.
 
I'd pay for a live stream.....as long as it had a good cover. :D





Seriously though, I agree that streaming is the wave of the future for things like this but right now I'm not so sure. I like to watch these TAR matches but as all of you know there are times when the feed freezes up or the sound goes out or it gets choppy because of so many people accessing at one time. Yeah, I'd be willing to pay for access to a stream of the world championships but ONLY if it was pretty much guaranteed that those things wouldn't happen.
MULLY
hope the cover line got a nervous laugh
 
Live streaming is definitely the way to go, especially for minority sports like pool. It is low cost enough that you can afford to do it even if the viewer count is only in the low hundreds and can be used to obtain some revenue through advertising and resale/restreaming of the recording. Add some kind of nice commentary, the possibility of audience interaction through live chat and it makes for a very enjoyable product!

Organizing a big tournament like this one, and not offering the possibility of live streaming is a lost opportunity of generating some income and promoting the sport and the players.

From here I would like to thank TAR, Fast Lenny, D. Walsh, Blackjack and all others for the broadcasts/recordings they kindly provide for my viewing pleasure and that are greatly appreciated on my part ;) :thumbup:
 
Absolutly i would have paid! it would be another way for fans of the game to bring it back to life !

I live 1 state over and i cant make it, just think about all the fans from around the world.....

I think streaming it is definatly the way to go, since our dreams of having good matches on TV is more of a pipe dream it seems!


Steve
 
First off I'm going to direct everyone to a thread from last year:

http://forums.azbilliards.com/showthread.php?t=67845

See my post number #3

So two things, a) it looks like they are posting some updates at the DP website, although it's extremely untimely. Also I said in my post I'd bring a laptop and do updates...but I didn't do that monday when I was there - shame on me.

You'd think that perhaps Charlie might peruse some of the forums to see what people think of how the events are being run, the only times I ever see posts from "koreandragon" (that is charlie right? or at least some sort of official channel for DP stuff?) is to promote things, there's no participating in the community here.

I have said before about other events, it is DEAD simple to at least reach a fairly large pool playing audience in the area - simply contact all the local league operators (APA/BCA/VNEA/house/whatever) and supply them with flyers to drop into their league packets, or send out mass e-mails to the league players.

It's almost like they don't even want to have people show up. I was there Monday, and yes that is the first day, but i can't believe they had more than 100 paying attendees over the course of the whole day.

To say nothing of the fact that at about 9pm Charlie walked by with an ipod dock, plugged it in and started playing music (which hadn't been playing all day) through the one tiny system...anyone that works in production management would have been able to tie into the room PA instead where it would not be as intrusive (one speaker means it's much louder on one side of the room than the other). To say nothing of the fact that he prbably did not license the music on his ipod for this use (just a guess here). And for that matter...the in room announcements were also not tied into the room PA, and they only had one loudspeaker.

Also, the room had empty space to one side...it would have been nice to seperate the tables a bit more so that the players were not so on top of each other.

Lets look at the live streaming thing that is the topic of this thread - I touched on this last year and pointed out that I work for a company that does this...had anyone read that even remotely involved in the production maybe they could have contacted me...

Anyway - it is pretty simple these days to do live streaming...you could definitely do at least a table or two virtually free - assuming you can find some video camera's to use for source, and assuming the hotel has at least a decent upstream bandwidth.

I don't think it would be out of the realm of possibility to have all 8 tables hooked up, but the hotel may not be able to support that.

I think there is a limited market for people willing to pay, but there is certainly some market for it. Personally I don't think I'd be willing to pay for it unless the quality was pretty high, such that you could manage to tell what was going on. But everyone knows you'll pay for the "marquee" matches - when the big names pair up.

It also would have been nice to see some official scorekeepers, I can't imagine it would be that hard to find people willing to sit at the table all day and keep score in exchange for say a free session (ie come in at 9, work to 5 then get to stay from 5 on without paying or working) - perhaps a tie in to some junior leagues (school is still out for the summer) - I imagine you could find a bunch of teenagers that would love to do that who would never be springing for $25/session to attend.

I know that money is an issue when promoting these sorts of things and running them, but seriously there's a point at which it starts being cheap...

It's sad really...

It must be something about NYC, the APA franchise here in manhattan is run like crap too - and the owner doesn't care about it...

more rant...just like last year.

I don't think I'm going to get a chance to head out again until thursday night, but I promise to do some liveblogging of whatever match I watch as well as posting info on other matches as it comes up whenever I am there.
 
Lemme put it out there, if anyone is running an event and wants some help/suggestions on live streaming please feel free to contact me.

The most important thing is lighting, the table needs to be lit enough that it looks good on video. What many people do not realize is that for video purposes the lighting needs to be much brighter than you do for just your eyes (if you've ever been to a taped pool match you'd be astounded by how much light they throw around).

After that you want at least a decent quality video camera - doesn't need to be anything expensive, but it goes with the "garbage in, garbage out" philosophy, if your camera makes the scene muddy and grainy, it will only look worse once it's encoded and the bandwidth is squeezed down.

Then you need to decide on picture size, if you have a good upstream bandwidth, do something nice and large...640x480 at around 300Kbps would be pretty decent looking and big enough to see what's going on.

How will you actually stream it, you need a computer onsite (at least one) that will do the encoding...the internet connection onsite needs to be stable enough to handle however much bandwidth you are putting out. Then there's your provider - if you are going cheap, there are some free services out there - no clue how good they are. Once you move into paying someone things will get expensive pretty quick though (one day, one stream of a produced webcast is going to run into the thousands potentially - unless you happen to have an in *wink, wink*).

If you are going to do a pay per view thing you may not be able to go with a free hosting provider though as setting up the payments and doing all that is typically not part of the free services.
 
juggler314 said:
Lemme put it out there, if anyone is running an event and wants some help/suggestions on live streaming please feel free to contact me.

The most important thing is lighting, the table needs to be lit enough that it looks good on video. What many people do not realize is that for video purposes the lighting needs to be much brighter than you do for just your eyes (if you've ever been to a taped pool match you'd be astounded by how much light they throw around).

After that you want at least a decent quality video camera - doesn't need to be anything expensive, but it goes with the "garbage in, garbage out" philosophy, if your camera makes the scene muddy and grainy, it will only look worse once it's encoded and the bandwidth is squeezed down.

Then you need to decide on picture size, if you have a good upstream bandwidth, do something nice and large...640x480 at around 300Kbps would be pretty decent looking and big enough to see what's going on.

How will you actually stream it, you need a computer onsite (at least one) that will do the encoding...the internet connection onsite needs to be stable enough to handle however much bandwidth you are putting out. Then there's your provider - if you are going cheap, there are some free services out there - no clue how good they are. Once you move into paying someone things will get expensive pretty quick though (one day, one stream of a produced webcast is going to run into the thousands potentially - unless you happen to have an in *wink, wink*).

If you are going to do a pay per view thing you may not be able to go with a free hosting provider though as setting up the payments and doing all that is typically not part of the free services.
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I love it when people who have never actually produced or streamed a live pool match talk about how easy and simple things "should be".

I guess I have one question. If it is so simple and easy, and someone should do it......why don't you?
 
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Good Idea

I was there last year in Manila. I was at some of the matches, and I watched some on TV. It airs live in Asia, and the coverage is far superior to anything here in the States. Our own Jay Helfert is one of the announcers.

I'm surprised one of the cable channels doesn't carry it live. It would run here from the early morning to early afternoon. A live stream of that broadcast would surely generate money.

Profitable? I don't know.
 
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did you not read my earlier post I work for a professional streaming media company, pool or otherwise I've personally produced hundreds of webcast events. It is easy, there is also a lot that can go wrong.

However, it's not like I'm just going to randomly offer to work for DP for free...

I just said, if anyone is going to run a pool event and wants help with the live streaming side of things to get in touch with me - exactly how much more outgoing do you want me to be.

I think attacking me because I didn't run over to the venue this week with a video camera is a bit harsh - if, say, someone reading this is involved with the US open I'd be more than happy to work with someone to help make something like that happen - I can't imagine Accu-stats lets anyone broadcast events if they are going to be there though, even if they are not on the TV table.

JCIN said:
I love it when people who have never actually produced or streamed a live pool match talk about how easy and simple things "should be".

I guess I have one question. If it is so simple and easy, and someone should do it......why don't you?
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