The YouTube Experiment

You ever have one of those ideas that itches at your brain? You see potential, but see roadblocks stopping you. Sure, most of those barriers file as clearable, but a couple fall into the category of completely outside your control.

So you wait, hoping others eventually clear a hole to sneak through. Because the idea will never leave until you finally decide to take the leap.

For me, that idea is streaming on YouTube instead of Twitch. The barrier that prevented me from diving in was Crowd Control.

Thankfully, through my Extra Life efforts, I’ve met Jaku who runs the whole operation. He saw me tweet that all I needed to take the YouTube dive was Crowd Control working on YouTube. Knowing that I’m a charity streamer, he gave me a workaround I wasn’t aware of.

I was out of excuses.

So last night, without much promotion or fanfare, I dove in. Because I clearly hate myself and/or subconsciously wanted to play a metaphor for the entire situation, I played the incredibly frustrating Getting Over It with Crowd Control enabled.

My only “goal” was that of functionality since I’ve never done it before—and anyone that has followed my streaming experiments knows they usually don’t end too well. Thankfully this one did!

In fact, I discovered that YouTube allows me to bypass a lot of annoyances in archiving my streams. On Twitch, I have to go “highlight” the entire freaking thing or I lose it (on Twitch at least—I record all my streams locally). Then I have to export to YouTube and go back into YouTube to fix the formatting errors the Twitch exporter continuously spits out, and make some other edits to get better discoverability.

And if I want to do a highlight video, I’m repeating that process all over again.

Instead, I streamed last night, and here’s the whole freakin’ video:

As I write this, the HD version is apparently still processing, but it looks like when it finishes I can make all the simple edits and cuts and everything will be right there without creating a new link/video (something that drives me nuts on Twitch).

All of that writing boils down to this: I’m going to focus on YouTube streaming to start the year. So if you haven’t clicked subscribe and the bell, or whatever those cool YouTubers say, please do so.

I believe that this move will allow for far more accessibility than Twitch did as I have now lost count of the times I’ve heard “I wanted to chat, but couldn’t figure out Twitch” or “I tried to Crowd Control, but I couldn’t find the extension” or even “what’s a Twitch?” You gotta cater to the demographic!

So here’s to taking a plunge in 2023! See you on the YouTubes.