VStream (a competitor to Twitch) Announced its notice of closure

[ZexMaxwell]

 

 

Summary

Vstream is dead. (actually not figuratively) Vstream was the Vtuber focused streaming platform that tried to give creators a bigger cut to profits and a different way of delivering content to viewers. while many can speculate why it couldn't get funding one thing is already known. Streaming is expensive.

 

Quotes

Quote

As much as we would have love to continue this platform and bring to life everything that we imagined, all good things must come to an end. VStream has ran out of the funding needed to keep the platform going, and have been unable to secure the funds needed after fundraising the last three months. Therefore, we have no choice but to shut everything down.

 

My thoughts

This is why no one can conquer the 3 streaming giants. As a person who has been following the Vtuber community I was really hoping for a better alternative for streaming in general. The website didn't play #ADs, provided a larger cut to their talents and gave a different method of streaming delivery by apple. While I want to say it could be the Delivery method at fault since I have a massive bias to AV1 encoding which Apple didn't support. I don't think it would have helped. 

 

Sources

 

https://vstream.com/

[da na]

Wait, who?

[ZexMaxwell]

2 minutes ago, da na said:

Wait, who?

This is another reason why this platform could have failed. the people who would have known about the service where people who would have only followed Vtubers. which is a really small subset of talents.

[da na]

1 minute ago, ZexMaxwell said:

This is another reason why this platform could have failed. the people who would have known about the service where people who would have only followed Vtubers. which is a really small subset of talents.

I follow two vtubers and I'd never heard of it. Again though that's only two vtubers lol

[Kisai]

23 minutes ago, da na said:

Wait, who?

Exactly.

 

On my twitter timeline, exactly one person ever mentioned it, and they still streamed on Twitch.

 

I quite literately have no idea what it was (was it a twitch clone? Was it an agency?), and if it was just doing the same thing Kick did and use the twitch servers anyway, then it was doomed to fail without a large financial backing.

 

Ads no longer support any "Free" content out there, the advertisers don't shotgun ads into the ether, and we're going to see far more "ad revenue vampire content farms" that further make advertisers think twice about advertising on streams that people aren't actually watching.

 

Paid membership is the only viable option going forward, or advertisement direct-placement/sponsorship. But we all know VPN, and Energy drink sponsorships are snake oil. So what else is going to advertise on streamers? More gacha game F2P stuff that they shut down in 9 months only to repeat with a new IP?

 

There is literately only two ways forward at the moment I see in terms of "video streaming" for Twitch-like communities

1) Discord starts making a way to "publicly watch" a stream but requires all interaction to be discord members.

2) P2P streaming where the streamer operates the head node, and everyone who wants to watch has to pay membership fees if they want to connect directly to the head node, otherwise they have to connect to someone who is willing to share their bandwidth who is connected to the head node.

 

 

[optimuss]

10 minutes ago, Kisai said:

requires all interaction to be discord members

You mean from platform streaming cost perspective? Because otherwise it makes no sense, why limit viewer base from the get go.

If all my current twitch subbed streamers (I usually have like 3-4 active subs) were paid membership from the beginning, I probably would not be watching any.

[porina]

1 hour ago, da na said:

Wait, who?

I'd consider myself an unsuccessful VTuber, and have not heard of them. Within my internet VTuber friends, all of them are on Twitch. Even if I include IRL game streamer friends, only 1 or two have tried YouTube or Kick. Even with all the fuss around Twitch causing Kick to be started hasn't really changed the landscape as I see it. Twitch is still going strong. YouTube is a kinda parallel but just not as developed for streamers to interact with chat.

[Kisai]

11 minutes ago, optimuss said:

You mean from platform streaming cost perspective? Because otherwise it makes no sense, why limit viewer base from the get go.

If all my current twitch subbed streamers (I usually have like 3-4 active subs) were paid membership from the beginning, I probably would not be watching any.

Because you, can not afford to stream.

 

Let's take a theoretical example. You want to stream your game/video/movie to your 10 friends. You have a straw of an internet connection, say 8Mbps.

 

In order for all 10 people to watch your stream directly off your computer, you need to limit the bandwidth to 750kbps. OR you could pay $99/mo for a server somewhere that acts as a proxy relay and protects your privacy.

 

So you can then stream 8Mbps to this box, you pay 99$ for, and then everyone connected to this box, can watch the same copy of the 8Mbps stream. But that server might only have a 100mbps uplink, so 10 people plus your ingress is 88Mmbps.  If it has a gigabit connection, maybe it will support 122 people. But how much are you paying for bandwidth. Many/most servers you can rent, limit you to 1 or 2TB of bandwidth before you get billed by the kilobyte of overage.

 

Do you want to pay for that? No. You don't. Twitch couldn't afford to keep operating in Korea, because it likely cost Twitch extortionate amounts of money in Korean bandwidth. Hence the P2P 

 

Now what you do is you require anyone who wants to directly connect to that head node, must be a member and say, pays 1/nth the amount of capacity of the server to connect to it. So if you have an 8Mbit stream, the first 122 people who connect need to pay you maybe $2 to break even, or maybe they pay you $5/mo and you make enough to operate a second server just in case you get like 124 members.  Anyone who is a member gets the stream directly off the head node, but they are required to "share" that stream as a condition of being able to connect to the head node. So every "free" person who tries to connect gets a "sorry bub, no membership, connect to member" message and as long as that member is connected, you get to watch, and if that member on the head node disappears then you get handed to the next person who has bandwidth to share.

 

The trade off there is, there is no accusation of pirating the stream, because you WANT people who aren't paying to watch, you just don't want to be footing the cost of it.

 

Now, I'm severely lowballing the cost of operating a server, because the kind of server you need is not one you can typically lease.

 

You need a server that can take your raw ingress (Eg a 4K 50mbps AV1 stream to pick a silly overkill value) + re-encode it into streams your viewers can watch. So nearly everyone can watch AV1, but not everyone is going to want to watch the 4K stream or at 50mbps, nor is 50Mbps is even reasonable for all games and content. Instead your stream relay box is going to have one Intel ARC, or Nvidia RTX 4060 or something to re-encode the ingress to a 4K 16mbps stream a 8mpbs 1080p, and a 3.5mbps 720p stream, 1.5mbps 480p stream's in AV1 and, an audio stream for PCM, AAC and OPUS codecs.

 

Nobody does this. Quite frankly the number of people willing to set this up is closer to zero because nobody wants to be held legally responsible for what they stream. But you could. And if your stream box head node is in a country/data center that doesn't respect copyrights all that could be done is your head node getting blocked. The P2P watchers won't be affected as long as a single member can connect to it.

[porina]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

So if you have an 8Mbit stream, the first 122 people who connect need to pay you maybe $2 to break even, or maybe they pay you $5/mo and you make enough to operate a second server just in case you get like 124 members.

At least based on Twitch, if you're consistently pulling 3 digit viewers you're already somewhat successful (partner level) and platform monetisation measures (subs, bits) are probably sufficient to cover costs. I think the pain point is below that. 

 

Thinking about possible self hosting, I'd relate things back to Twitch. Let's say we cap the same at 6Mbps. Using my own internet connection (73 Mbps upload) I could self serve up to 12 viewers. Or 11 more than I usually need  Probably should be lower to ensure headroom and doesn't choke. Max viewer count could be increased by adjusting data rates depending on tier. Subs > followers > others for example. Variable max rates depending on available headroom. I am ignoring the obvious problems with revealing your own IP address here, so this might only be useful to stream to trusted friends, and not public facing.

 

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Quite frankly the number of people willing to set this up is closer to zero because nobody wants to be held legally responsible for what they stream.

If you mean the content, if you're going through Twitch for example, you'd likely need to comply at the least with both your country of residence as well as Twitch's. If self hosting, it doesn't change that much unless you're deliberately wanting to do something more questionable.

[Kisai]

24 minutes ago, porina said:

At least based on Twitch, if you're consistently pulling 3 digit viewers you're already somewhat successful (partner level) and platform monetisation measures (subs, bits) are probably sufficient to cover costs. I think the pain point is below that. 

 

Thinking about possible self hosting, I'd relate things back to Twitch. Let's say we cap the same at 6Mbps. Using my own internet connection (73 Mbps upload) I could self serve up to 12 viewers. Or 11 more than I usually need  Probably should be lower to ensure headroom and doesn't choke. Max viewer count could be increased by adjusting data rates depending on tier. Subs > followers > others for example. Variable max rates depending on available headroom. I am ignoring the obvious problems with revealing your own IP address here, so this might only be useful to stream to trusted friends, and not public facing.

That's why you need the head node server somewhere that isn't your backyard. If you use just your own connection you're probably violating the ISP ToS anyway of not operating servers without paying for the business tier (which tends to be billed by the byte with no "unmetered" option.)

 

24 minutes ago, porina said:

If you mean the content, if you're going through Twitch for example, you'd likely need to comply at the least with both your country of residence as well as Twitch's. If self hosting, it doesn't change that much unless you're deliberately wanting to do something more questionable.

 

I mean like NSFW streams, Intentionally-copyright ignoring (music, video, pirated games, etc), problematic games where the rights owner (Eg Nintendo) will throw a fit if you play modified versions.

 

This doesn't even ask how you would get payments. Because, again, the reason Twitch can't offer NSFW is because the payment networks won't give them a discount on intermingled NSFW high risk payments with low risk ones. Let's assume we side-step this and say people had to pay with Ethereum or Bitcoin, that still leaves the question of who is going to convert this to and from fiat money.

 

If you can't pay for membership with a VISA or Mastercard, your subscription model is dead in the water.

Like, seriously:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/15/gumroad-no-longer-allows-most-nsfw-art-leaving-its-adult-creators-panicked/

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-updates-policy-for-adult-content-sellers/

Quote

Moody told The Hill that the requirement for a content review process prior to publication of adult content isn’t feasible for livestreaming on sites like Twitch or Chaturbate, which she called “one of the best income sources for smaller models who are barely scrapping by.”

 

The payment networks do not care about catering to things like streaming, adult or not. This is one of the reasons why webcomics are basically dead or dying, because the only way they can make any money is by printing physical books now. There is no money in "ebooks" at all except to do feedback farming, and that's largely being done by AI now.

 

Make garbage digital product -> put ads on it = ad revenue model destroyed

Make garbage digital product -> put on amazon = Amazon feedback model destroyed, market flooded with garbage.

You can also substitute Amazon with eBay, Walmart and Bestbuy. Even "Youtube" itself, the feedback/likes are irrelevant because bots can massively "like" or "dislike" anything.

 

Every time a tech solution comes up to solve a problem, the reason why that thing was regulated in the first place rears it's ugly head, and that solution becomes worse than the problem it tries to solve.

 

Anyway, I'm all for people trying, but it's pretty clear that anything intended to compete with Twitch or Youtube either needs massive pockets, or has to leverage a P2P model. And once you switch to a P2P model you've pretty much let any possibility of monetization go, since you're going to have to deal with some ugly payment monster that will tell you what content you can make and can't make.

[thechinchinsong]

5 hours ago, porina said:

YouTube is a kinda parallel but just not as developed for streamers to interact with chat.

Is YouTube not a viable alternative? I see Vtuber Youtube streams all the time, probably more than gaming streams on Youtube. Although that is probably due to the algorithm catering to me. I don't use Twitch much, but the layouts seem pretty similar.

[Kisai]

25 minutes ago, thechinchinsong said:

Is YouTube not a viable alternative? I see Vtuber Youtube streams all the time, probably more than gaming streams on Youtube. Although that is probably due to the algorithm catering to me. I don't use Twitch much, but the layouts seem pretty similar.

Corporate Vtubers have success on Youtube because they have marketing budgets. 

 

Phase Connect is based in Vancouver. They advertised on other Vuber content, because I've seen this exact ad.

Literately:

That's Harbour Center.

 

Anyway among Western Vtubers, Twitch is where the community building and social interaction is. Korean Vtubers were formerly pretty big on Twitch, but then Twitch had to pull out of Korea.

 

Among Japanese (Corporate) Vtubers, they're basically JUST on Youtube. This is because superchats are still not really a thing on Twitch, and they briefly were and then... not https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/06/22/introducing-hype-chat-a-new-way-to-stand-out/

 

Youtube is FULL of bots. Different kinds of bots, but they're there, and they are worse than on Twitch. Twitch you can get away without "sub only mode" as long as you have at least one moderator. Youtube... forget that, you'll get random bots popping in and promoting other youtube channels at random.

 

 

[williamcll]

Too small of an audience target. Add the fact they never attracted major investors meant they were doomed from the start.

 

Kick and Bilibili are still viable alternatives to youtube and twitch (niconico is poorly optimized for personal streaming, if ever) if you want to stream in an unfamiliar enviroment.

 

And before you ask, no, hololive isn't banned on bilibili, they've been Streaming HoloFes5 at the same price as other sites.

[porina]

4 hours ago, thechinchinsong said:

Is YouTube not a viable alternative? I see Vtuber Youtube streams all the time, probably more than gaming streams on Youtube. Although that is probably due to the algorithm catering to me. I don't use Twitch much, but the layouts seem pretty similar.

It can be but still different. A benefit of streaming on YouTube is you can get some crossover between pre-made content and the streams, which you lose if you use Twitch instead. I suspect but just my opinion, many streamers on YouTube got growth through pre-made content first.

 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Corporate Vtubers have success on Youtube because they have marketing budgets. 

Does feel like most agency use YouTube. Hololive, Nijisanji, Idol to name a few. I'm less sure on VShoujo, as two of them I follow do stream on Twitch.

 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Among Japanese (Corporate) Vtubers, they're basically JUST on Youtube.

I forget the name but don't (some) of them use a Japanese platform too? Like some of the older hololive members have relatively small followings on YouTube because they have a following elsewhere.

[Brooksie359]

17 hours ago, Kisai said:

Exactly.

 

On my twitter timeline, exactly one person ever mentioned it, and they still streamed on Twitch.

 

I quite literately have no idea what it was (was it a twitch clone? Was it an agency?), and if it was just doing the same thing Kick did and use the twitch servers anyway, then it was doomed to fail without a large financial backing.

 

Ads no longer support any "Free" content out there, the advertisers don't shotgun ads into the ether, and we're going to see far more "ad revenue vampire content farms" that further make advertisers think twice about advertising on streams that people aren't actually watching.

 

Paid membership is the only viable option going forward, or advertisement direct-placement/sponsorship. But we all know VPN, and Energy drink sponsorships are snake oil. So what else is going to advertise on streamers? More gacha game F2P stuff that they shut down in 9 months only to repeat with a new IP?

 

There is literately only two ways forward at the moment I see in terms of "video streaming" for Twitch-like communities

1) Discord starts making a way to "publicly watch" a stream but requires all interaction to be discord members.

2) P2P streaming where the streamer operates the head node, and everyone who wants to watch has to pay membership fees if they want to connect directly to the head node, otherwise they have to connect to someone who is willing to share their bandwidth who is connected to the head node.

 

 

From what I understand twitch is largely funded by ads not subs. Obviously some creators typically make more from subs but that is the creator not twitch as a platform the idea that ads don't pay for free content anymore is simply not true. The issue is making sure you actually get the ads to serve but big players in the field seem to be doing fine. Maybe subs could be more than ad revenue if the sub rate was higher but subs also lessen the pool of people to advertise to so its complicated. Anyways I think the idea that ads can't support free content is just silly as it's mostly in the streaming space where it is harder to use ads to support the content and they still manage to make it work on the larger platforms that can get the ads. 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Brooksie359 said:

From what I understand twitch is largely funded by ads not subs. Obviously some creators typically make more from subs but that is the creator not twitch as a platform the idea that ads don't pay for free content anymore is simply not true. The issue is making sure you actually get the ads to serve but big players in the field seem to be doing fine. Maybe subs could be more than ad revenue if the sub rate was higher but subs also lessen the pool of people to advertise to so its complicated. Anyways I think the idea that ads can't support free content is just silly as it's mostly in the streaming space where it is harder to use ads to support the content and they still manage to make it work on the larger platforms that can get the ads. 

Ads DO NOT support free content anymore, they haven't for at least 5 years. This is all google's fault for systemically destroying ad value over time by pushing high value ads to the most popular 0.1% of content, and letting the remaining 99.9% of content get the "bid zero" ads.

 

You've all seen it.

 

Every site in the red block is clickbait content farms full of ads, and their content itself is mostly stolen.

 

Why would anyone ever click on this stuff? These are ad units you should be sticking in your hosts blacklist because you will never click on it, and the scripts that load make the page jump all over the place as the page expands 4 times.

 

Stuff like this is why people go de-facto ad-block.

 

Now what about video ads? Twitch does something that Youtube doesn't. Twitch actually interrupts the video stream at the encoder level while the ads play. If you capture the stream directly (Eg to play in VLC or MPC-HC) you won't see the ads, but you still won't see the stream during the ad time either. Youtube however doesn't do this, youtube stops and sends you to another video URL before returning. If you bypass the site and capture the video stream, it just continues, and sometimes throttles down after a minute if you are doing things wrong.

 

Ads in the red, are why people are blocking ad content, ads in the blue are not. These ads in these two ad blocks are directly competing with each other for the bottom. If you have 18 ad units on the page, you aren't getting 18x the revenue, you are getting 1/18th the revenue per ad.

 

If you are running ad supported content, you should have no more than 2 ad units (of different shapes) and nothing more. Beyond that and the site looks like a filthy supermarket tabloid. Ironicly the National Enquirer website has more content on it than CNN does, but still has one of these garbage ad blocks at the bottom.

 

[Brooksie359]

4 hours ago, Kisai said:

Ads DO NOT support free content anymore, they haven't for at least 5 years. This is all google's fault for systemically destroying ad value over time by pushing high value ads to the most popular 0.1% of content, and letting the remaining 99.9% of content get the "bid zero" ads.

 

You've all seen it.

 

Every site in the red block is clickbait content farms full of ads, and their content itself is mostly stolen.

 

Why would anyone ever click on this stuff? These are ad units you should be sticking in your hosts blacklist because you will never click on it, and the scripts that load make the page jump all over the place as the page expands 4 times.

 

Stuff like this is why people go de-facto ad-block.

 

Now what about video ads? Twitch does something that Youtube doesn't. Twitch actually interrupts the video stream at the encoder level while the ads play. If you capture the stream directly (Eg to play in VLC or MPC-HC) you won't see the ads, but you still won't see the stream during the ad time either. Youtube however doesn't do this, youtube stops and sends you to another video URL before returning. If you bypass the site and capture the video stream, it just continues, and sometimes throttles down after a minute if you are doing things wrong.

 

Ads in the red, are why people are blocking ad content, ads in the blue are not. These ads in these two ad blocks are directly competing with each other for the bottom. If you have 18 ad units on the page, you aren't getting 18x the revenue, you are getting 1/18th the revenue per ad.

 

If you are running ad supported content, you should have no more than 2 ad units (of different shapes) and nothing more. Beyond that and the site looks like a filthy supermarket tabloid. Ironicly the National Enquirer website has more content on it than CNN does, but still has one of these garbage ad blocks at the bottom.

 

Maybe I misunderstood what you meant. I had thought you said twitch couldn't support it's free content with ads but rereading you said twitch like communities so I guess you would be referring to not twitch but it's competitors. I guess I just don't think this holds true with all free content but I can understand if you are saying some places won't have the legitimacy necessary to get good ads to support the free content which is probably true. 

[Stahlmann]

A platform can promise streamers whatever it wants, as long as there are no users, streamers will still make more money on a platform like Twitch where the cut is smaller but the audience is much bigger. That's why any new streaming platform is going to have an extremely hard time breaking into the market. The audience is on Twitch. And unless you have an audience, streamers are not going to come.

 

That's why these huge exclusivity deals with big streamers are a thing. Platforms like Kick have to build up an audience of regular users before other streamers will even consider using the site.

[Mark Kaine]

On 3/20/2024 at 10:57 PM, optimuss said:

You mean from platform streaming cost perspective? Because otherwise it makes no sense, why limit viewer base from the get go.

If all my current twitch subbed streamers (I usually have like 3-4 active subs) were paid membership from the beginning, I probably would not be watching any.

yeah, these platforms trying to micromanage everything are pretty much doa tbh (unless you're onlyfans... is that still a thing... lol? asking for a friend of course)

 

[Mark Kaine]

On 3/21/2024 at 9:28 AM, porina said:

Like some of the older hololive members have relatively small followings on YouTube because they have a following elsewhere.

niconico? bilibili? ... youku? 

 

[Mark Kaine]

On 3/21/2024 at 5:40 PM, Kisai said:

Every site in the red block is clickbait content farms full of ads, and their content itself is mostly stolen.

is this Microsoft edge? im confused...~

 

some 90s website?  just what is this lol.

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

is this Microsoft edge? im confused...~

 

some 90s website?  just what is this lol.

CNN.

 

[SteveBinLaden]

On 3/25/2024 at 9:26 AM, Kisai said:

CNN.

 

Sites like this are even worse on mobile, as the spam banners take up wayyy more space in terms of vertical real estate with ~1 link per row at a time, sometimes in the middle of the article. It's gotten to the point where most browser-based news sites are essentially unusable on mobile.