First Day of Streaming

After many hours, days even, of preparation, the first day finally arrives. Anxiety takes its place and the hardware seems to feel it, since it either starts failing or falling apart, along with all the preparations.

My first day was in January and it’s been a while now, so talking about it can be kind of tricky, since memory is definitely not my strong suit, or even a strong suit. I’m bad when it comes to remembering stuff, like really bad.

However, your first day is an important milestone and that’s why I think it’s important for me to share with you all that I can actually remember about it. It serves multiple purposes, not only providing motivation but also showing you that not everything goes according to plan. You just need to know how to take this in stride.

So, here’s what I can recall from my actual first day of streaming, as in, my first broadcast. I was pretty nervous, even though I had tried to lay the foundations, do the groundwork days before, really. Still, once you start streaming, you’ll realize that technical difficulties are a given, really. They will come, whether you want them or not, tried to prepare for them or not. So that’s kind of what happened, a few issues here and there with the key bindings I had set up for my stream’s Game Capture but forgot to replicate in another scene, all on the classic OBS.

Once those were ‘resolved’ the audio was still a long ways off of ideal, but I tinkered with it with some help from the awesome ExilePT (@Exile__PT) and a very kind and awesome viewer (thank you mallycakes!), all whilst attempting to play some Darkest Dungeon.

I distinctly remember being sort of pissed (and wrongly so) at Red Hook Studios for the freaking timing of when I actually planned to start streaming (January 2016) and their Darkest Dungeon release, so quite a few big-name streamers and channels were playing it that night and I couldn’t amass much interest from a few people, which, given all the tech difficulties and stuff, is understandable.

But, as with all things I’ve mentioned so far, some bad situations will arise, just so you can learn from them and move on to something better, really. So, once I stopped cursing my lagtop (affectionate pet-name for my laptop, which I also fondly dub, ‘the streaming potatoaster’), it got better… a lot better. I interacted more with the ‘OH so exciting’ 2 or 3 viewers in my channel and ‘Lo and behold!’, one of my other good friends, also a streamer, the awesome Foamz (@FoamzTV) brings in a small support crew in the form of a raid, even throwing out some host love my way.

This, as you can probably imagine, was huge, getting me in front of just a few more people, some of which even dropped a follow on my channel, pushing me out of my comfort zone and forcing me to learn to adapt to a growing crowd, on a faster pace. To this day, I am very grateful to all of the people mentioned above, since they were pretty much some of my first followers, viewers and supporters, helping me get the stream ready for organic viewers walking in (people who enter through the browse features of twitch, such as a person joining because they like the game I’m playing and there aren’t too many live channels with it right now), for the additional engagement and interaction it generated and some of the new-viewer questions.

From there on out, the stream was a blast, I was no longer as nervous and it was really a matter of continuing to try and obtain some audio balance so as to reach an equilibrium and a visual quality decent enough that it still, to this day, consistently makes people question me when I tell them I stream on the lagtop (both the laptop portion of it and mostly even the specs, are the things that really surprise people).

All in all, it was a bad, turned good, turned great, day which kind of evolved into it’s own thing, being both a milestone for my first broadcast but also a learning experience in and of itself.

So remember, when you’re just starting out, all that really matters is that you put forth your best effort to entertain any possible viewers that would walk in. Don’t really focus on the numbers, actually try and avoid knowing how many viewers you have, since it’ll just psych you out if you have none or way too many.

Eventually, some people you might already know, some good friends or even some complete strangers who happen to be awesome people, will drop by and give your channel a chance. If you keep up your effort, you’ll be as amazing as ever when they do, and hopefully get that very precious first follower who you’ll try to convert into a regular that’ll be dropping by often in the future.

And thus, a channel will be born and with it a small community will be formed. But it will grow! Believe! Then keep at it!