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SSS Ep: 6 Why Stream Pinball?

Mystery Pinball Theater 3000·video·1h 29m·analyzed·Aug 18, 2020
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.037

TL;DR

Pinball streaming data shows 40x viewer disadvantage vs HOTS, but hosts argue growth isn't the only reason to stream.

Summary

George and Manu from Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 and Don't Panic Flip discuss why streamers choose to stream pinball despite unfavorable growth metrics. Using Twitch data from Sullygnome, they compare pinball streaming to Heroes of the Storm, revealing that pinball averages only 33 concurrent viewers versus 2,958 for HOTS, with top pinball streamers gaining an average of 6 followers per 14 days versus 68 for HOTS. The hosts explore structural barriers to pinball streaming growth (high equipment cost, inconsistent game layouts, viewer education requirements) and emphasize that while the data shows pinball is a poor vehicle for follower growth, there are intrinsic reasons streamers continue to produce pinball content.

Key Claims

  • Pinball averages 33 concurrent viewers on Twitch vs Heroes of the Storm averaging 2,958 concurrent viewers (past 14 days)

    high confidence · George cites data from Sullygnome API showing Twitch Pinball category at rank 1,097 with 11,378 hours watched in 14 days vs HOTS at rank 70 with 994,166 hours watched

  • Top 10 fastest-growing pinball streamers have follower growth 1,264% lower than top 10 fastest-growing HOTS streamers

    high confidence · George presents calculated growth ratings comparing pinball (1.58 max growth) to HOTS (17.75 max growth), with fastest HOTS streamer gaining followers at 1,123.4% rate

  • Average pinball streamer (top 100) gained 6 followers in past 14 days vs HOTS streamers averaging 68 followers gained

    high confidence · George displays top 100 averages sorted by follower growth, showing pinball at 6 vs HOTS at 68

  • Average watch time for top 100 pinball streamers is 102 hours in 14 days vs Heroes of the Storm averaging 6 hours watch time

    high confidence · George notes this counterintuitive result suggesting pinball viewers are more engaged despite lower overall viewer counts

  • Most successful pinball streamer has 25,580 followers, gained 13 followers in past 2 weeks, averages 120 viewers, peaked at 170 viewers

    high confidence · George presents anonymous top performer data for pinball category ranked at 14,775 on Twitch viewer scale

  • Most successful HOTS streamer has 430,000 followers, gained 514 followers in past 2 weeks, averages 2,343 viewers, peaked at 4,297 viewers

    high confidence · George's comparison top performer showing HOTS streamer ranked at 1,105 on Twitch viewer scale

  • Blizzard spent approximately 50 million dollars on Heroes of the Storm advertising and competitions worldwide

    medium confidence · Jeff Johnson mentions this figure in chat during discussion of why HOTS has significantly higher viewership than pinball

  • There are roughly 6,000 active HOTS streamers versus 101 pinball streamers who produced content in the past 14 days

Notable Quotes

  • “Whenever you start something you're going to be crawling like a baby until you can walk, until you can run. And you always are going to be literally streaming for no one at the beginning.”

    Manu@ 5:19 — Frames the reality of starting a stream with no audience as an inevitable phase, setting context for why follower growth metrics matter less for beginning streamers

  • “The fastest growing stream, which by far does not have the most followers, right now with the highest growth rating is at 17.75. That's a relative number. It only makes sense when you compare it to the next, which is Heroes of the Storm.”

    George@ 10:51 — Demonstrates the stark mathematical gap in growth potential between pinball and HOTS streaming categories

  • “Heroes of the Storm has a follower growth rating that is 1,264% higher than Pinball. I'm just going to take a second to let that sink in.”

    George@ 12:06 — Emphasizes the magnitude of the disparity in growth metrics between the two categories

  • “if you're a pinball streamer, you realize now that the hard data says not a lot of eyes are available to you.”

    George@ 22:40 — Directly addresses the limited addressable market for pinball streamers based on category-level data

  • “in pinball every game is unique a lot of people like to stream old stuff in their EMs so you have to understand what's different between EMs and new pins... nobody knows what's going on unless they've played it a bunch or watched a ton of streams”

    George@ 31:01 — Identifies structural barrier to pinball streaming: inconsistent game layouts prevent viewers from jumping between streams without relearning game rules

Entities

GeorgepersonManupersonJeff JohnsonpersonSam SternpersonFlipstreampersonSteve KirkpersonPindaddypersonTronik

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball manufacturer (Stern implied) has not invested in streaming/tournament ecosystem comparable to Blizzard's ~50M investment in HOTS, suggesting strategic deprioritization of Twitch as marketing/revenue channel

    medium · George's hypothetical about 'Sam Stern' investing in pinball teams/tournaments; comparison to Blizzard's marketing spend demonstrating correlation between corporate investment and category viewership growth

  • ?

    community_signal: Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 / Don't Panic Flip actively producing educational content about streaming mechanics, audience expectations, and data-driven decision making for pinball community

    high · Entire stream format dedicated to 'Why Stream Pinball?' data analysis; hosts explicitly state goal is to 'manage expectations' and help streamers understand realistic landscape

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Pinball streaming community appears engaged and supportive despite unfavorable growth metrics; Twippies Awards referenced as alternative prestige metric suggests community values recognition beyond follower counts

    medium · Flipstream's quip about Twippies Awards; multiple chat participants asking substantive follow-up questions; no hostile or dismissive tone toward pinball streaming despite damning data

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Pinball category suffers from lack of standardization in game layouts and rules, forcing viewers to invest significant education time; contrasts with standardized game streaming (HOTS) where viewers can jump between streams without relearning mechanics

    high · George's extended discussion of pinball game inconsistency (EMs vs modern machines, different rule sets) creating viewer friction; Pindaddy's observation that people 'don't get pinball' without education

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.270

0:00
Hello! We should be live, and you should be able to hear us. Hello. I see audio. Manu, can you... Yeah. I am here. I am talking to George. and we're going to school you.
0:32
We're going to try. You guys, welcome. I'm George. That's Manu. He's MPT3K. Don't panic, Flip.
0:45
I hope you guys can hear those sounds. I'm not sure that you can, but they're right in my ear every time someone talks for the first time. You can't. Okay, great. So it's just bothering me. It's not even helpful to everybody else. This is perfect. This is exactly the kind of learning I feel like we need to do.
1:05
Manu, what topics are we planning on going over tonight? That's a very good question. Well, we haven't done this in a while. So we have a lot of things backed up. We have many shows backed up of things to talk about. But this one I wanted to talk about, one of the things we want to talk about is why are you Pinball Stream? and if you're here as a pinball streamer we have some data for you we want you to go away happy and we want to manage your expectations so there's that what else are we talking about George? we're also going to talk about checklists when streaming Manu do you have a checklist that you go through before a stream to help you not forget things like the weird sound issue I'm having right now. Oh.

medium confidence · George's speculative estimate based on sampling top 100 in each category

  • “Someone with all three [entertainment, instruction, personality] streaming for one hour has a better chance than someone with none of those streaming for 10 hours.”

    George@ 25:17 — Proposes entertainment quality and engagement matter more than streaming duration for growth

  • “We're trying to maybe help you understand or help you re-understand why you do it [stream pinball].”

    Manu@ 26:32 — States the episode's core thesis: examining intrinsic motivations for streaming pinball beyond follower growth metrics

  • “Can you imagine if Sam Stern threw a ton of money at pick a pinball team? Or just at Twitch? Suddenly competitive pinball became a lot more competitive.”

    George@ 15:05 — Speculates on how manufacturer investment could theoretically transform pinball streaming ecosystem similar to Blizzard's HOTS strategy

  • “but has the hot streamer gotten three Twippies Awards?”

    Flipstream (chat)@ 34:25 — Humorously suggests alternative metrics of success in pinball community beyond follower counts, implying prestige/recognition value exists

  • “So there is the barrier to entry to be a pinball streamer, which is higher than the barrier, the lowest barrier of entry to be like a game streamer where all you need to do is capture your thing and send it to Twitch.”

    Tronik (chat)@ 29:37 — Identifies equipment cost and physical pinball machine requirement as structural barrier limiting pinball streamer pool

    • person
    PinkNinjaManperson
    Tee'd Off Pinball Pursuitperson
    Jack·Botperson
    Waxperson
    Dialed in! (Collectors Edition)person
    Blizzard Entertainmentcompany
    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000organization
    Don't Panic Fliporganization
    Twitchcompany
    Sullygnomecompany
    Heroes of the Stormgame
    Stern Pinballcompany
    $

    market_signal: Pinball streaming represents niche category with severely limited addressable audience (33 avg concurrent viewers) compared to mainstream game categories; structural barriers (equipment cost, game inconsistency, viewer education) limit growth potential independent of content quality

    high · Comprehensive Twitch API data showing pinball rank 1,097 vs HOTS rank 70; top pinball streamer at 25,580 followers vs top HOTS streamer at 430,000 followers; George's efficiency calculations showing pinball streamers need to out-perform HOTS streamers proportionally

  • $

    market_signal: Jack·Bot identifies high equipment/screen cost as potential barrier to pinball streamer participation, though George assesses this as having insignificant impact on overall streamer pool size

    medium · Jack·Bot chat comment about costs of streaming setup; George's response that barrier to entry doesn't meaningfully reduce streamer pool (estimated ~101 active pinball streamers vs 6,000 HOTS)

  • ?

    technology_signal: Hosts discussing camera equipment upgrades (Sony A6000 vs CX405) and streaming technical setup optimization, suggesting incremental hardware evolution in pinball streaming ecosystem

    low · George plans to present Sony A6000 vs CX405 comparison; discussion of pre-flight checklists and streaming setup complexity

    • 1:59
    I'm sorry if you're having a weird sound issue. That was the loudest grr I have ever experienced in my life, and it is only in my ears, and it is not on anyone else's. So that was great.
    2:14
    Yeah, definitely. I think you and I both have kind of complex streams, and without a pre-flight checklist, something could go horribly wrong. So we're going to compare pre-flight checklists also. What's up, Owl? Get learnt.
    2:34
    Fliptrotic, I am going to have to owe you that pull-up. Why not partnered? Exactly, Owl. That is the question that we're going to address in Why Stream Pinball and what we have data on to support why or why not that may be a goal while you're playing streaming pinball, that is. And then finally, I think the third thing we're going to chat about is the Sony A6000. It is a mirrorless camera, and it's an upgrade that I did recently from the CX405. And the question is, is it worth it? are we actually going to see a benefit between the CX-405 and the A6000? I'm really interested to see what we have there. We only spent a few minutes taking a look at the side-by-side. So when we get to that part of the segment, I think that's going to be a lot of fun. Also, I'm not going to tell you which camera is which while we play a game. I'm just, heads up now, you guys are going to have to guess which one you think is the expensive and the other one, which isn't quite as expensive not that it's cheap by any means spoiler alert i got it wrong yep that is wow way to just spoil that one right off i like kirk's checklist checklist one cold beer two fridge turned on three beers that is honestly a huge part like i forgot to do the beer it's not in my checklist too that sucks But I forgot the beer. And after I started the stream, I'm like, oh, wait, Manu, hold on. I got to run off and go grab the beer. So that's a, it's an important part.
    4:14
    Audrey says this whole thing is spoiled. So it's not worth it. Well, time to go to bed then. Just another pinball stream. We're going to put that at the end of the segment, just so that way you have to watch all of it to get there.
    4:28
    So without further ado, do we, my name is George. and Pez Johnson is where dopest BA playing pinball today. Who said that? Okay. Do we want to just jump right into the, to the, the, the, the soul wrenching information that we have mined from the internets? Yeah. Um, for just a little bit of context, um, um, George and I constantly have conversations about streaming technical stuff, but then there's also a conversation about, some of the I guess some of the I'll be honest, really honest, some of the attitudes towards what some people maybe feel like should be happening during their pinball streaming adventures. Whenever you start something you're going to be crawling like a baby until you can walk, until you can run. And you always are going to be literally streaming for no one. the beginning and then you will continue and stream you know and hopefully get better at what you do as an entertainer and as as as everything goes on so that being said there are um
    5:45
    we could talk about why are you streaming we can show you some data that will give you a good perspective on where you stand as a pinball streamer and i think that's um enough context for that.
    6:01
    Okay. Here we go, guys. I hope you're ready for this. Also, Manu, you're going to have to man the chat. I can't look at it while this is happening. Jeff, thank you very much. 500 bits. My hat's off to you yet again. Thank you very much.
    6:18
    Okay, here we go. So, another game that I really enjoy playing that isn't the most ridiculously popular game on Twitch because, you know, I'm a sucker for punishment is a game called Heroes of the Storm.
    6:33
    And we want to compare data from Heroes of the Storm, which isn't the most popular game on Twitch, and the people who stream it aren't the most popular people on Twitch, to something like Pinball, which also is not the most popular thing on Twitch, and the people who stream it are not the most popular thing on Twitch. But just how not popular? And what's the comparison there? so um first of all what is heroes of the storm it's made uh by blizzard it is a moba which is a multi-person online battle arena it is the least popular amongst all of the popular mobas there is league of legends uh there is also dota 2 and then there's heroes of the storm coming in really, really low. Comparatively, it's the newest of those three, and Blizzard has, like, deprioritized development on it. So it's popular, but it's not that popular. And I just want to point that out now, because these numbers are going to be fun. But let's do a high-level comparison between Pinball and Heroes of the Storm, just looking at the previous 14 days. Some of these values are kind of small, so I'm gonna, uh, I'm gonna just say a lot of these out loud, but in pinball, the average viewer rank is 1,097. The average viewer rank in Heroes of the Storm is 70th. Okay, that means that there's 69 other games that have a higher average viewer rating on Twitch in the past 14 days. And then I'm gonna jump around a little bit. In pinball, in the past 14 days, there has been 11,378 hours of pinball watched. In the past 14 days on Heroes of the Storm, there is 994,166 hours of streams watched. Okay? Some of the big ones here I want to give you is that the average number of viewers watching pinball at any time is 33. The average number of people watching Heroes of the Storm is 2,958. That's an average 24 hours a day of people who are watching Heroes of the Storm is just shy of 3,000.
    8:59
    Okay, there's a pretty significant difference between these two games on Twitch. And if you guys remember, you define what you're playing based under a particular category. Okay? So that's what this is. A category is a game. A game is a category with regards to Twitch. I'm going to scroll down. Let's look at some cool numbers from the top 10 pinball streamers who have the best follower growth over the past 14 days. who already have, and I say followers is greater than or equal to 300. So I'm going to say that they have an established base of followers. And this is on Twitch past 14 days. I'm going to show, it's blown up at the bottom. But I ran a couple of calculations based on watch time versus stream time. And I called that efficiency, meaning that somebody who streams for an hour and gains 50,000 hours of watch time is really, really efficient. And that's where you have efficiency ratings. And then you have that efficiency rating being used against the average number of viewers for that particular streamer. Then you remove the weighting of, let's say, somebody has 20,000 or 5,000 or 1,000 or only 200 followers. We're going to remove the number of followers from that calculation in order to generate an unweighted average. And finally, we're going to pull in the number of followers actually gained to generate a growth rating. And that's what you have at the bottom. The fastest growing stream, and remember, this is anonymous. I purposefully did not put any names in this list. But the fastest growing streamer with an established follower base right now has a growth rating of 1.58.
    10:54
    It's a relative number. It only makes sense when you compare it to the next, which is Heroes of the Storm.
    11:02
    So Heroes of the Storm has a lot more view time. And I'm going to skip describing all of that. I'm just going to jump right to the end. The fastest growing stream, which by far does not have the most followers, right now with the highest growth rating is at 17.75. Now, I could go back and forth and kind of mess with you, I guess, as I scroll back and forth very quickly, but I'm not going to do that, even though I just did it. Instead, I'm just going to show some of the results down here. That in Pinball vs. Heroes of the Storm, when comparing Heroes of the Storm to Pinball, the number one growing streamer is gathering followers at a rate of greater than 1,123.4%. That's what I would call significant. That's, maybe that's poorly said, but, and then if you average the top 10 fastest growing streamers across both categories, Heroes of the Storm has a follower growth rating that is 1,264% higher than Pinball.
    12:16
    I'm just going to take a second to let that sink in. I'm also going to switch back over to the chat. I just see Manu with his mouth wide open as he sees all of these values. And I've seen them before, too.
    12:32
    It's just staggering. that's those are those are significant numbers wind raider and that's a really good thing so we need a hot steam pinball we don't hots is not that popular on twitch like that's the i i didn't take something ridiculously popular and i also tried not to take something that is is new and super popular so something like fall guys which is seeing something i think between 20 and 50,000 people at any time on Twitch looking at that. Those numbers, I think, those might be unsustainable. It might totally be. Fall Guys might be a great game that we see just a ton of growth in as a channel long-term, or it might be the current flavor of the month that it ends up crashing within the next six months and the developers move on to something else. I have no idea, but because it's new, I didn't want to tackle that. I wanted something that had been streamed for a very long time and has consistent numbers and people that are in the hobby doing it, which is kind of similar to pinball, I think, in many respects. And just catching up on chat, did I miss anything really big that we should go over before I show even more information about pinball? No, it was kind of quiet during the information dump. And I'm just kind of calling out some people. And some people are... people can be the secondary reason people tune in, which is a great, really good comment by Kirk.
    14:04
    Dice just asked, where is this data cultivated from? That is the last sheet in this. We'll go over, but for just spoiler, it's from a website called Selenome. And Twitch, if you utilize their APIs, offers all of this information for free. You can access and build these reports yourself. but the website's Sully Gnome, Sully, S-U-L-L-Y-G-N-O-M-E.com. And the last page, we'll go over it. Oh, when? It's the past 14 days. So I generated all of this information in the past three days, and I looked at the previous 14 days' worth of data.
    14:42
    To be fair, HOTS has big money behind it from Blizzard. They paid a fortune to get it in front of viewers. Absolutely. Jeff, it has a market. It has a viewer base. It's competitive in a way that pinball isn't and probably never will be.
    14:58
    Okay, good to know. And I'm taking notes. Great, great. So I'm going to jump back over and let's – Oops, sorry. Can you imagine if Stern threw a ton of money at pick a pinball team? Or just at Twitch? Stern doesn't have any horse in the game. much um you know it's fun that we have jeff in here because i think jeff mentioned uh previously having gone to blizzcon so i i think he he might know a lot more about blizzard and i wonder if when he says that that blizzard throws a lot of money well yes it might be at the marketing side of it i think a lot of it has to do with the big money in tournaments as well so what if to to make it kind of easy. What if Stern just dropped a 50,000 a year into, into tournaments and, and suddenly competitive pinball became a lot more competitive because there, there was a reason that there was the possibility that someone could actually be a pro pinball player. I don't know that there's anybody that, that is a, is a pinball player that, that makes enough money to, to survive at this point. Um, George, did you take a look at Flipronix, uh, message? I'd be curious, how our category would stack up against something like board games or D&D categories.
    16:14
    Fliptronic, I would be happy to do a follow-up after this stream. So we were just talking. Manu, what was it that you said you wanted to go over in the next second stream?
    16:26
    Oh, God, I forgot. What was it? Did you... were you thinking about doing the Orin board? At some point, yeah. Okay, cool. whatever whatever that next stream is uh i would be really really happy to get some feedback uh from people who are interested and we could find another one or two categories to do additional comparisons with because i i chose hots because i knew it wasn't the best and i'm personally like i've been watching heroes of the storm for a while i i really enjoy watching it i find the competitive nature to be great and it seemed to fit what it was i was trying to to to get at uh in this stream, but I would be very happy to try and choose a couple of others and see, um, and, and see what those comparisons are like. If the, if the follower growth is, is just, is that much greater in, in other categories that may rank differently.
    17:23
    Um, there's an interesting discussion going on about Stern possibly giving money to Deathflip, blah blah blah and uh uh jeff says blizz put somewhere around 50 million into hots for advertising and competitions worldwide um although i do see that kind of so if hots puts that money into advertising on twitch does that turn into viewership maybe a rhetorical question does that turn into viewership for hot streams or does it just advertising at that point like you know what I mean, because we're talking about, we're kind of talking about specifically streamers who stream pinball.
    18:05
    Possibly if Twitch got pinball advertisements, people, more people would be interested in it. Fliptronic says, yeah, ads equals awareness equals seeking out gameplay on Twitch. I agree. The more people that you get, I think, interested in a sport, the more people you're going to find end up making their way to Twitch to watch people who do it well. I think so, at least. I didn't make it. I went to YouTube first. And then I remember when some of the YouTube people were making the switch over to Twitch. And I was blown away because I'm like, wait a second, I have to watch you live? What a silly platform. Just record your stuff and put it online so that way I can watch it when I want to. I was so flabbergasted that somebody would do that. And then for whatever reason, one day it clicked and it made sense. I'm like, oh, it's like live television. I can get behind that. And I could chat with people and interact with them. And I thought that that was just the bee's knees, as Dice would say.
    19:03
    So Jeff makes a really good point. Agreed, it's a small change for Blizz, but gets you in the front page now. Have you ever seen a dead flip stream where he gets on the front page? Yes. That number shoots to 4,000 viewers and maybe better.
    19:22
    We don't have that kind of resource. And pinball, your average pinballer is anywhere, serious pinballer is anywhere between 30 and 50.
    19:37
    Most of the people running around on Twitch are like my son, who's 11. You feel the need to monitor his Twitch time? I always monitor his Twitch time. Kirk also brings up a really good point by the way that any really popular stream it becomes nigh impossible to chat on the actual streams because the chat moves so quickly that the person streaming can occasionally jump in and just pick something to respond to but for a stream that's getting 2 or 3 thousand views you're probably getting 2 or 3 hundred people chatting actively and you lose that kind of one on one that I think drives a lot of people over to Twitch initially.
    20:23
    I missed what Wax was mentioning. It doesn't work that way. I missed what he was referring to. Dice just gifted a sub to Wax. Guys, I don't have any of the sounds turned on. For whatever reason, I redirected them to my headset, and I didn't figure out what I did wrong. George ignores me regularly because he is getting too popular now. Kirk, I never ignore... I go back up and reread chat. No, I totally... Yeah, I suffer. I struggle, I should say, and I feel like such a jerk.
    20:56
    Good. No sounds, no distraction. Dice, my hat's off to you, though. Thank you so much for that gifted sub. 179, that's ridiculous. But wax, enjoy the emotes.
    21:07
    I'm going to keep scrolling through here just to keep things going, but feel free while scrolling to be like, George, hold on a second. Someone had a good question. And stop me.
    21:17
    So top 100 averages. These are the top 100 in each category sorted by follower growth and then averaged. So the average number of followers for people who stream pinball across the top 100 is 789. For Heroes of the Storm, it's 18,953. In pinball, for the past 14 days, the average number of followers gained is 6. the average number of followers gained in heroes of the storm is 68 uh in pinball the time streamed uh this is actually i think kind of fun pinball the average time streamed is 7.74 hours and the average time streamed in the past 14 days for heroes of the storm is 38.79 that is that's you're working half time that's 20 hours a week for heroes of the storm uh and then this this other one is rather significant in pinball the amount of uh of twitch channel watched in pinball is 102 hours for the past 14 days that an average and the average for heroes of the Storm is 6 hours of watch time So it like I sorry it like all this equates to just what your base of viewers starts at. Like, if you're a pinball streamer, you realize now that the hard data says not a lot of eyes are available to you. Right? Right. I mean, we're seeing that really clearly right now. Yep. So what is the average age of a hot streamer versus a pinball streamer? Dice, that is a really good question.
    23:02
    I don't have that information. I was going with the information that was available online. I started to do some really fun stuff with camera comparisons and other attributes on pinball, let's say, that make it all the attributes of a pinball stream. How many cameras? How many people are streaming? Is it 1080? Is it 720? Is it 30 frames per second? Is it 60? And I do have some cool numbers associated with that has to do with whether or not something is consistent across, let's say, the top 10. But that isn't planned for discussion this evening only because I don't feel super... I don't feel like those numbers are super accurate. Also, Jeff jumped in. Hold on. Who has a lot of information about Blizzard. Time stream is interesting. Unless people are streaming big hours, they won't grow. And that was, Jeff, I'm not sure if you heard or if you were here early on, but there's an efficiency number I calculated, which was if I stream for an hour and get 10,000 hours of views, I think of that as an efficiency rating for certain streamers. and HOTS actually has across the board a higher efficiency rating and I wish I would have summed that up here but the the they even though they might stream for 40 hours the amount of watch time of the 40 hours that they stream is still significantly larger oh obviously you can see it right there you could just divide 3879 uh by 6120 and subtract one from that number it also you know for me it's not about streaming lots of hours to get to get um results that's not streaming smartly that's just like that's just streaming and then hoping someone sticks around to follow you um it's if if you're streaming for 24 hours straight and you're playing pinball somebody will come around and maybe follow you but if you're somehow entertaining them and giving and some kind of either entertainment instruction or something personality, heaven forbid, you have a better chance. Right. Someone with all three streaming for one hour has a better chance than someone with none of those streaming for 10 hours. And as much as I agree with that statement, I don't technically have any data to support that statement. I feel like it's pretty self-evident. But that's the thing is in some of the other fun calculations I did that I don't feel comfortable right now presenting as hard evidence. I started to look at levels of chat engagement as a way to hopefully objectively determine, I guess, across different streamers, not so much personality, but I guess how often they actually chat and interact and make the audience feel like they're a part of the stream, which I think is at least related to what you were kind of getting at there. and that's something that I think I plan to spend a little bit more time on because while these numbers make it seem like pinball is not a great way to grow followers, I hope at the end we can summarize why there are good reasons to stream pinball as long as you're not looking for followers or monetary success. Yeah. Right? Yeah. George and I are both on the same page about that. we're trying to maybe help you understand or help you re-understand why you do it. JB, I really want to, okay, JB says, it also costs a lot to get started streaming pinball, even more to have a quality screen. I'm not sure how much of this plays into how many streamers we have.
    26:57
    George is the data man. I'll be the speculative guy. I don't think it plays at all um or i think it has a very insignificant um um role in how many streamers oh how many how many streamers i'm sorry i thought you meant how many followers you got um no yeah i i don't yeah i just looked at the the top 100 uh in each category yeah yeah if we're talking about the streamers i i don't know there might be 6 000 hots streamers and 101 pinball streamers who who actively have done something in the past 14 days. Uh, but I just looked at the top 100 and ran and ran results from that, from both categories. Uh, and Kirk Hobbs, have you looked into the number of repeat watches of streams? Uh, and how many watch after the fact Kirk Hobbs, that information wasn't readily available, but that's a really good one is, uh, is, is which of the two different categories, uh, ends up as opposed to live watching hours, it's a post or, or repeat watches. and I don't know that Twitch offers that information up easily. It wasn't available through Sully Gnome.
    28:07
    And PinkNinjaMan, any reason you are comparing HOTS? Oh, I think Jeff actually responded to that already. Yeah, so it was just picking a game that I had some context with that I understood and was mainstream, as Jeff said, but not one of the top 10 games. There are roughly about 100 other games that you could play that will get you even potentially, sorry, that you could stream that could potentially get you even greater growth, assuming that the more popular the game is, the faster your growth rating is. But once again, I haven't done a comparison. Like I could run this comparison, let's say, for 10 different games across 10 different levels or sets of data based on rank and then you could do a linear regression and hope to see some sort of upward trending line where it increases based on the popularity of a game and popularity being based on the average viewer rank, let's say on Twitch, which does fluctuate quite greatly.
    29:08
    So Pindaddy, yes. So Pindaddy says, I wonder if there's a barrier of interest slash understanding to get past. Yeah, there's that. People just don't get pinball. They don't understand it. They don't know. They just think you're smacking a ball around and hoping. They don't know what the rule set is. They don't know what exactly they're looking at. So Tronik also makes a really good point. There are a bigger pool of streamers. We would have a bigger pool of viewers because each streamer with them brings a few and IRL friends when they're sticking. So there is the the barrier to entry to be a pinball streamer, which is
    29:43
    which is higher than the barrier, the lowest barrier of entry to be like a game streamer where all you need to do is capture your thing and send it to Twitch. You don't even need player count.
    29:56
    So extreme real pinball takes work. So naturally, we're going to have a lower pool of people doing it.
    30:07
    So yeah, these are all really good points. Man, I want to keep jumping in and responding to a lot of these questions. Pindaddy has a really good one. Hots is hots no matter what. and and it's i think what he's getting at is that is that there there aren't as many differences between hot streams and pinball streams pinball streams on the other hand which is almost something we thought we were going to tackle tonight having to do with layouts and how you actually present a pinball stream which is something that we do need to go over at some point because there are a bunch of different ways to do it but that also is like a category-wide hindrance because every time somebody comes to look at a stream they have to re they can't expect the game to be full screen with somebody's face and a green screen behind them on the lower left hand corner like they can with hots that's how everybody does it so you can jump in on anybody's scream and scream uh stream and and just start comprehending what's happening in pinball every game is unique a lot of people like to stream old stuff in their em so you have to understand what's different between ems and new pins i've got a teenage mutant ninja turtles right here and this game is deep as hell nobody knows what's going on unless they've played it a bunch or watched a ton of streams and that is and i may present that information very differently than manu how you present that information so i i feel like that's a really good point pin daddy to bring up but yet another reason why if you're looking for follower growth if you're looking for twitch success, that might not be a good reason to stream pinball. And remember, this was started, it delved down into a data comparison, but the question was, why do you stream pinball? And what I did is I wanted to, this is something that Manu and I discussed, and I wanted to take a look at the data to see if the data supports success and growth by streaming pinball. And I think what we're seeing, and I'm going to jump back into this tab right here, into this page, that the data doesn't really support that.
    32:07
    And at this point, I went through the data and, oh man, there's so much chat that we were missing out on. I apologize right now. But I just wanted to take, let's take the most prolific streamer on HOTS and the most prolific streamer on Pinball. These are, we can think of them as successful,
    32:27
    the most successful, but I think prolific is a better term, meaning that their content is watched the most. They have the most followers. You can assume have the most subscriptions. These are the people that are most successful in HOTS and most successful in pinball. And once again, this is anonymous. I'm not going to say any particular names. But in pinball, the most successful pinball streamer is at 25,580 followers and gained 13... Yeah, thank you, guys. You understand where I'm going with pinball. is that 25,580 followers has gained 13 people in the past two weeks, averages 120 viewers, peaked in the past 14 days at 170, and the watch time was 2,605 hours, with an average viewer rank of 14,775. Okay? Uh, that means that there are 14,774 people who are ranked better than that most awesome streamer in pinball. Okay. Now jumping over to HOTS, number of followers, 430,000 followers gained in the last two weeks, 514. they average viewers over the past two weeks is 2,343 uh with a peak viewer of 4,297 uh over almost 120,000 hours of watch time in the past two weeks and finally uh an average viewer rank of 1,105 this person is the best in heroes of the storm that is the the most prolific streamer and there are 1,104 other streamers who are doing it more successfully than they are.
    34:25
    Fliptronic says, but has the hot streamer gotten three Twippies? It's anonymous. Well said, Fliptronic. Good night. Jeff, thank you so much for hanging out. Thank you so much also for the information. I didn't get to see all of it, but you have a unique, I feel like, view in this channel because it's focused on pinball on Blizzard, and that was a total coincidence. So thank you for hanging out and providing all of that and responding to people. That was ridiculously helpful, and I will see you tomorrow.
    35:02
    Do we really need to grow that much? I like our niche little hobby. Emily and Dr. John, really good question. So to bring it back, the question is, why do you stream pinball? and i'm going to flip over because i think maybe this is the next stream yes look at this why the question was why do you stream pinball and if it's for money if it's for popularity or if it's to build a following choose anything that's not pinball choose but choose wisely right if you go back to the question, why do you stream pinball, and it's something like you enjoy the technology you want to get better at pinball you want to be a part of the community if you're looking to converse with others who are just as fascinated with pinball as you, if you're just bored, if you want to help out a location to do location-based streaming, if you enjoy teaching and you just want to get pinball out there if you enjoy performing and you also happen to really like pinball if you want to justify weekday drinking uh or if there's something else if if those are your reasons those are good reasons i think to stream pinball but i feel like the weekday drinking thank you emily and dr john uh but if you're if the reason you stream is to make money to become popular or build a following The data, I feel like, shows without a shadow of a doubt that pinball is not the right category to do that. And you could easily meet those goals more successfully, efficiently, effectively by choosing just about any other game type. And even still, even still, it's hard AF to become a partnered Twitch streamer and make money off of Twitch. even still even if you're streaming the most popular game in the world that's going to be tricky so put that in perspective and then finally Dice had mentioned earlier where are you getting this information from check out Sully Gnome that is S-U-L-L-Y-G-N-O-M-E what a great website that has made it very very easy to take data, export it to Excel, perform all the calculations you want to in Excel. It was awesome. It was such a crazy stumble because I was struggling with a couple of other Twitch statistic websites whose information seemed inaccurate. And I stumbled on Sully Gnome and I haven't found, comparing the data that they have about me and then comparing that to my Twitch dashboard, those numbers are right on all the time. So I trust the data I'm getting back on Sully Gnome. I think it makes sense. I didn't see any values where I was like, that doesn't make any sense. They have a computational error that needs to be looked at. Like, as far as accuracy goes, I think I found a really good website that we can all reference.
    38:20
    So I'm going to switch this back over to chat. And now we can catch up. What's interesting about Soli Gnome is it allows, well actually the Twitch API allows so much publicly accessible data, it's insane. Coming from the world of YouTube, which is where I started, we don't get any of that. So there's not a lot of data available to YouTubers. We only have tools that can only estimate things. but YouTube is 180 degrees different YouTube you know you can you can the the argument of you know viewers on Twitch and views on YouTube completely different YouTube I can subscribe to 17 people and I can watch all 17 people's content and it all equals the same thing I have one pair of eyes unless I'm Wolfman who has 27 screens open to 27 Twitch streamers I can only one watch one stream at a time right and then no one wants to watch vods on on twitch because the whole uh the whole system is based on being there with the person right at the time yeah that interaction yep so um on the flip side it's much easier to see progress on twitch flip side sorry keep going on the flip side thank you very much on the flip side there's um much easier to see progress yes clipstream you're very true there's also i would say zero discoverability on twitch there's nothing pushed at you youtube will help you if you watch a video about cats youtube will send you a thousand more videos about cats which will not do that cats cats cats okay so so whereas on youtube it took us a year to get to a thousand subscribers and then four years later we're at 12.2 thousand and subscribers on my YouTube channel. For Twitch, I don't know, it took six months for me to become an affiliate.
    40:23
    And that's just the way it works. Now to get paid on Twitch, forget it. That's a much higher goal. I digress. But anyway, I was just trying to, you know, I'm coming from the YouTube world. That's where I have my bread and butter. You know, that's where revenue is actually coming from for me, not from Twitch. I'm curious, Manu, what is your YouTube channel? Do you mind sharing that? Do you want to share that? Would you prefer not to?
    40:51
    Whatever, DM me. Okay, cool. Okay. And Al says he watches a bunch of videos on the internet about cats. Also, I think that Dr. John may have given himself a pinball injury recently, and that was in response to Dice mentioning pinball-related wrist arthritis. So not only is there little opportunity to make money in pinball, but the injuries are real and there's obviously not going to be any medical benefits provided on the pro-level pinball, competitive pinball scene. um i just want to i just want to mention one one more thing um if you're frustrated at your growth on twitch one thing that you should you should think be thinking about is not just relying on growth while you're streaming on twitch don't rely on going on a stream and getting all your viewers and then going offline and then that's it um george was very uh very adamant about me starting a facebook page for my channel um i also do the thing where i export um my things to youtube i also on youtube make content exclusive to youtube today i just posted a highlight reel of my twitch streams um the reason you want to do this george also started a facebook i started to Facebook. I started Instagram. I started Twitter. The reason I do this is because when I'm working on my stream and I'm offline, my likes are going crazy because people are following me. I'm not getting followers specifically on the stream. Followers are hitting me while I'm offline. And that's an indication that I know that people are finding me other places. Yep. Flipstream just echoed that same thought there with the growth doesn't come from Twitch. it comes from all the other social media that redirects but continue exactly yeah because twitch just twitch won't help you guys twitch will not help you so try and make it diversify try and make it so that you're discovered even when you're sleeping right i'll wake up i woke up this morning and i had seven new followers i wasn't streaming at two in the morning um but it's one of these avenues of social media and stuff like that that got me there so um you you really need to learn how to help yourself if if that's if you're if you're stressing about i'm not getting any growth those are ways to get growth right yep and then to bring it back around why do you stream pinball it's got to be for something other i feel like than growth or uh monetary success or popularity on Twitch.
    43:44
    Emily and Dr. John. Sorry? Emily and Dr. John. Again, still poor return for effort, MPT3, but so appreciated. I'm not sure what you mean, Emily and Dr. John. I have to be there. I'm not sure if you're joking or if you're serious.
    43:59
    Let's just think, George, if you streamed when humans were awake, how popular you could be. Okay. Moving on from why do you stream pinball to the checklist. So this is trying to avoid problems on stream, which can result in you getting potentially disconnected, or maybe you don't even recognize that there's a problem until the end of the stream and your stream could have looked or been better. There could be audio delays, there could be all kinds of stuff, but this is something Manu and I discussed a while ago and didn't really realize that in our heads we had checklists that we hadn't actually put down onto paper. And it's interesting because Manu does a lot of on-location based streaming so his checklist is a little different from mine which is focused more on I have a I just switch out the game and I leave all my equipment in one place get a provider that doesn boot you off at midnight dice you know you can only do so much Hopefully of the near future I going to switch back over to the checklist And once again, Manu, you're going to have to handle chat. Interrupt me when you have a question. So this is the checklist I came on with, which is turn on and align all external lighting. You guys, you know me. I'm a big fan of lighting. so that is the first thing I do when I come into the garage is I turn on all the lights because it's dark in the garage that helps A and B it actually takes me a long time I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 8, 9, 10 I have 11 different lights that I need to turn on in the garage before each stream that is a white balance nightmare uh number two is i check the pinball machine pitch and level and that is before every single stream uh i will if i'm moving the pinball machine so on turtles which i played i think seven streams in a row i only checked the pitch when i first set it up and then i checked the level before each stream by putting my sensor on the glass not the play field uh but i do take the glass off when i when turtles is getting moved away uh for tomorrow night and jurassic park is getting moved back in i'll take the glass off set it down and measure pitch and balance on the on the playfield so i'll go through and do that every time i move it uh three is uh clean the pinball machine um just to prevent any damage to the playfield once again my list is i think going to be very different from my news because these are my games or their their their trades with other people i know so i want to make sure we're not going to cause any damage. I always clean the glass because dirty glass makes for a really dirty stream. And I make sure that there's not dirty in that way. I'm not sure.
    46:52
    I'm sorry. I should have muted myself. And then I clean the play field. Let's see here. Confirm pinball machine is working with a test game. That is guaranteed what I will put up my best game of the night is the test game. after I have cleaned it and after the pitch and everything is set correctly, I'm like just, just one game before the stream to make sure I'm not going to run into any problems. And that's when I hit all the wizard boats guaranteed, uh, connect everything to the streaming laptop. So I've got the streaming laptop down to my left. I've got, uh, one, two, three cables, four Cape, five cables, the power, which I always forget now for whatever reason to actually plug into the power outlet. Uh, I need a separate step identified to be like, not only do I set it up and throw the cable over the backside, but I need to go around and remember to plug it in because that's been a problem recently. I've got to connect up the Cat5 cable. Remember, don't stream on Wi-Fi. Friends, don't let friends stream on Wi-Fi.
    47:50
    USB cables, and then I have USB, other things that are mostly kept connected, so I don't have to worry in the way that Manu might, let's say, to go through and connect up all the individual other cables. For the most part, I just push everything a little bit further back from the pinball machine, move the machine out, place it over behind me, move the next machine in, and then move everything back a little bit. So there's just some repositioning that needs to happen. Set up cameras. So each time, as I just explained, there's some movement, which means I need to realign the play field, the DMD LCD, and the player. I don't typically have to realign, but I do sometimes need to change the exposure. I've been doing some midday streams recently where it's bright behind me. So there's a lot of settings that need to be adjusted. So every time you set up a camera, you got to make sure... Am I missing something?
    48:42
    I can't reach that anymore. That's why your streams have been a bit slow lately, George. You're forgetting to plug TMNT in.
    48:52
    So different times of day require different light settings, which means adjusting the exposure uniquely. I feel like I decide to play pinball at different distances depending on the day of the week. I don't know what that is, but I always end up having to redial in the focus because I use manual focus on this cam. This over here, the Playfield cam, which you can't see, the one that's up here, is set to automatic focus. But this one is set to manual because I can't get the Sony autofocus to be amazing all the time.
    49:26
    Checking audio connections. This one has got me many times. It got me tonight. I didn't go through and check all of the boxes with all of the audio connections. And sure enough, the sounds that play when people come in and first chat normally plays on the speaker. Instead, they were playing through my headphones and weren't getting picked up by the stream. so it was playing incredibly loud on my headphones to the point where i couldn't think while it was happening felt like harrison bergeron anyone who gets that reference you're amazing because one of my favorite short stories and uh and i messed up i didn't follow my own checklist uh stream deck is another one the stream deck is amazing and tonight's a really good one where uh i'm using a different obs uh profile or series of scene scene collections so i needed to go through and create a new stream deck profile to associate with each of the scenes. Then last thing I need to do is start chatbot and Roboctopus so that way the sounds get triggered when people do things, which is turned off right now so that way it doesn't blow my eardrums, and Roboctopus to allow you guys to control the lights and respond to events on Twitch. That is my checklist. I'm then ready to start streaming. Manu, do you want to go through yours? I will in one moment. First, I'm adding, remove channel point rewards you don't intend to redeem.
    50:49
    How many pull-ups do I owe right now? Jeez. It looks like it's two. Okay, there's only two. I will absolutely redeem those. As soon as this is over, we're going to break for a TPN quick video. You guys get to see some really cool top clips in TPN once we're done going over MPT3K's checklist. and then we'll hit the final component, which I know just another pinball streamer has been waiting for all night, which is the comparison between the CX-405 and the Sony A6000 as playfield cameras. So MPT-3K, take us away. George, I was telling you all day, there's something I forgot to add to my list. Yes. There's something I forgot. What was it? And Flutronic, you might have been joking, but that literally was it. What is it? Remove channel point redemptions you don't intend to redeem. Okay. that it may have started as a joke fliptronic but seriously for me it's on your list it's so it's on his list for me that's a huge deal because i have things that break sometimes and if i don't remove those channel point redemptions people waste i feel like i've wasted their points because it didn't happen so i'm not going to go through step by step on my list um it's a lot of the saying turn on the mics turn on the cameras um but i will point a couple of things um i'm running a lot of external programs um stream deck roboptopus which george is running which george has written so we're running it um streamlabs chatbot and leon board now if anybody if you haven't heard of leon board and you're always asking me how do you do the thing that's how you do it i'm going to do a we're going to do a second city second city second stream silver ball where i will walk you through my my setup we'll actually look at obs we'll look at my leon board setups and my process for creating new channel redemptions um but if you just want to go to youtube type leon board obs you can get started all right um i have to run all these programs outside of OBS. I haven't even launched OBS yet, and I'm running a lot of programs. For audio, my only different thing from George is that I have to monitor my audio. If you watch my stream, you see I have this little network style Secret Service Man thing in my ear. He's CIA.
    53:20
    You can use anything. You can use Bluetooth headphones. I would probably not use Bluetooth headphones. but you can use anything that serves as a monitor because I need to hear when a redemption is made so every one of my redemptions has a sound associated to it that's different so that when I'm looking at the play field and someone redeems a murder voice it makes a different sound and I know oh now I'm sounding like a murder voice I don't hear it on my end you hear it I don't hear it but I know when it goes I'm out of murder voice so um that's a really huge point for me is to make sure the monitor and output is set on certain things and not other things and then it's the same as everyone else check all scenes test point redemptions that'll i'll add get rid of the ones i can't use test riff and color which always works test sound and um it says what no test riff and color which always works thank you thank you Well, Roboctopus never fails. The other things may fail sometimes. Neon Boar doesn't fail either. And then if I'm doing a V-Pen, I'm doing different things. And you can't riff right now, Little Bubblegum. Or you can't do Color Purple. You can do Color Purple. Oh, you can do Color Purple. Yeah.
    54:41
    So that's basically it. Very true. Thank you, Flipproduct, for the reminder. PC and console gaming only needs a single camera to be effective. Pinball needs a minimum of three.
    54:54
    And can MPT3K do a riff? I don't have it set up to trigger on this channel, but on MPT3K's channel, you absolutely can.
    55:04
    So, switching back over to chat view. Close up. With his mouth, can you do an actual riff? That's what Audrey wants at this point. There you go.
    55:21
    That was actually a beatbox. Yeah, that wasn't a... I started a game. Hey, you know what? I'm going to kill our audio and really quick walk through a quick TPN introduction, you guys. The Pinball Network, both Manu and I are a part of. It's a collection of content creators across multiple media, being podcasts, Twitch streaming, or YouTube video creators. and it's people who just genuinely love pinball, I think, for the sake of pinball. And we asked earlier, why do you stream, right? So I feel like it's pertinent. And let me show you guys the July top clips. I think it's the top 10. And then we'll walk through the upcoming TPN Twitch streaming schedule. And then we'll be right back for the final portion of episode six, which is a comparison between the CX405 and the A6000 Sony camera after an upgrade I made recently. We're going to get to see a side-by-side comparison. Guys, we'll be right back.
    56:43
    By the way, you have an extra ball on the street. Yeah, I don't know how to hit that. Cut. Okay. Yeah, I don't know how to hit that. Oh.
    57:08
    There's the tier three you love. Oh, I don't like it. It tastes like wood.
    57:25
    My bologna has a first name. It's O-S-C-A-R. My bologna has a second name. It's M-A-Y-E-R. How I love to eat it every day. And if you ask me why, I'll say, cause Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A. slowly savor the flavor audrey i feel like that's a really good idea yeah yeah let's do that we'll totally savor the flavor this is a kalua white russian
    58:11
    Yep. That's not zipping at all. You're in your sock drawer. You're looking for your favorite pair of socks. Okay? It goes a little something like this. Five, six, seven, eight. Where my socks at? Okay?
    58:38
    Do that at a party. That's right. yeah you don't really need to though because it's totally a separate play field like yeah unless you have two ball multi-ball oh yeah okay well that makes sense on separate oh shit that's great
    59:11
    Oh, hello Mission Control, we have a problem. Hey Rordon, do you know how to clip a clip? Clip that. Hello, for those who don't know that is what a flipper button looks like and the best place for a flipper button is not here, it's here. My nut fell off.
    59:36
    No shit, damn I missed it. Obviously. Obviously? Say it again. Obviously? You said obviously? Because you said obviously. And I said obviously? With a question mark at the end to say what's obvious about it. And then I said obviously?
    59:56
    Why the hell aren't you answering your question? Because I'm not hearing. What are you saying? What are your words? Can you guys help me? Are we going to go through this again? Please. Okay. Okay, you said, and then you said, obviously. And then I looked at you and I said, obviously? As if to say, what's obvious, Alan? And then you're supposed to just say what you thought was obvious. But then you said, obstaphone, and then that was it. That's where the conversation ended. Once I see this later, I will remind you what I thought I might have said.
    60:37
    I will be in the right spot. Can you do it? Yes! Welcome to Jurassic Park. All right. right so what do we have coming up on tpn dice i remember when the hobby pinball players didn't make me watch their ads then big pinball took over and started pushing their propaganda come on though it was so worth it for flip tronic at the end with the number one clip and that awful sounding version of like my like a five-year-old with a flute trying to play the jurassic park theme. It was just, it was awesome. It really was. But what do we have coming up next on TPN? We've got Faye, who I think is actively streaming right now. We've got We Love Pinball tomorrow afternoon. We've got Flippin' Out Pinball tomorrow evening. We've got Faye, who is doing evening through, I think, morning. He's planning on doing a long stream. You've got me from 10 until 12, and this is all in Mountain Time. And then finally on Tuesday, you've got One iPod, One Pinball. The glasses were a nice touch, yeah. So, switching back over to chat. Guys, we are here. We are at the third part of the stream tonight. We've got roughly about 21 minutes to try and cover it. Trickle-down pinball doesn't work. Hashtag not my pinball.
    62:56
    All right, here we go. This is the comparison between the CX-405 and the Sony A6000. now this should be really really fun i like this part manu i feel like you're gonna have to lead the conversation here and chat jump in point out differences i'm not gonna tell you right now which is which but realize that one of these cameras is outputting at 1080 and one of these cameras is outputting at 720 both at 60 frames per second wait george are you over saturating like normal uh he owl is trying to get some inside information no no hold on i'm gonna i'm gonna make sure that we have no saturation i think one of these might have saturation right now hold on. It wasn't that one. And hold on. This one is saturated a little bit. So I just turned the saturation down on one. So this is all settings from the camera. Okay. Wait, George, are you oversaturating like normal? A6100 on the left says flipstream. That would make all the difference. People are going to think the more saturated one looks better. It's really interesting you say that al anonymous because i yeah it's the whole argument of you know when you when you go see a tv in the supermarket supermarket sorry at the you know tvs on display are always set to store mode which is super saturated and super bright um because they have to compete with every other tv around them and that people have just been conditioned to think well that's the better tv since it's super saturated um now this is what we're doing here is we're trying to ask the question do you really need to spend the money on a mirrorless dslr when you could get away with just using your cx405 and does doing that give you more followers or somehow make your stream better go ahead I was just going to say and so it's the question of whether if you have a lot of income and you just are rich like that I guess it's not a question but if you're struggling and you're like well maybe this will get me more viewers maybe this will make my stream better Will it really? Like your return on investment. A 920, even in price gouging, is $150, which it really shouldn't be. But an A6100, what is that, George, $600? So I think the kit lens we estimated used, you could probably pick up for about $250, and I got the body for $300 used. So all in, it was $600. There was also, in order to use it on the play field, you have to get a special power adapter for the battery because you can't have it plugged in for power at the same time that you're actually outputting via a mini micro HDMI. Even a bit blocker doesn't stop it. It's just you can't do it, which is why they have a unique battery to power connection for the A6000.
    66:34
    Yeah, Dr. Curly Tech. It's a dummy battery. Exactly. So there was a couple other things I feel like I had to get. I also needed an SD card for the A6000, which is weird. I don't need one for the A6400. It won't let it work without an SD card. It starts giving you error messages if there isn't one in there.
    66:54
    Kirk Hobbs. Okay, cool. So really quick, I want to point out that Flipstream and Fliptronic and Alnonymous have all pointed to the left as the 6000 series Sony and the right as the CX-405. Now, I'm not going to tell you which one Manu said, but Manu got it wrong. I'm curious, both of you guys, what made you jump so quickly into deciding which is which? what made you say that the left screen I want to point to the left but it going to happen what made you think that the left is the 6000 and the right is the CX
    67:31
    George, you also might be giving it away by putting your skin tone in the shot. Believe it or not. If anyone knows. Interesting. If anyone knows, right, skin tone and how it's handled.
    67:48
    Top of the play field clarity. Okay. Ooh. interesting you bring that up oh fliptronic said the same thing crisper at the top edge of the left by the way if you're just shooting on your phone talk if there's no oh wait i missed that uh talk uh if there's no talk i'm leaving right if you're just going on iphone that makes sense top of the playfield clarity i think the 6000 is on the right says wind raider okay the pizza topping on the right is better but the skin tone on the left is better the pizza topping interesting so this spot right there uh and oh interesting i was wrong a61 is on the right says flip stream oh flip stream change okay okay so what are some of the before before we we show which is which um and the fact that it isn't decisive i think says something right there like if if you can't clearly see the difference between the two um i think that says something but manu what can you expect difference wise between the cx 405 and the and the 6000 and i'm going to play while you're explaining that so that way people can see the motion as well right okay so what i would expect is i would expect the uh image to be sharper on the 6000 because the sensor and the glass in the 6000 it's pretty much going to be sharp way out to the very edges of the glass. Whereas the webcam, the 920, is going to lose sharpness no matter what because it is much more of a fisheye lens. The other thing is skin tones, which is not fair because we're not really comparing skin tones. We're just comparing saturations and stuff.
    69:41
    Skin tones are going to be more or less the range is going to be more dynamic for that 6100. Basically, it comes down to the sensor and the glass. The sensor and the glass is going to be way better in the 6000 than it is in the 920.
    70:00
    George also has lit them amazingly. So, you're getting the best out of both cameras right now. If we turn half those lights off, it gets significantly different. Okay, we're going to do it. We're going to do it. Let's turn some of these lights off. I am going to turn off. So I have five lights on this play field right now. Do I turn off the pin stadiums first, or do I turn those off last?
    70:27
    What if you turned all the lights off? Well, then you don't have the deal. All right, I'm going pin stadiums here. So there go the pin stadiums.
    70:39
    Right? I thought this was a CX-405. Just another pinball stream it is. So one of these is a CX405. 405. I said 920. 405. My bad. Okay. Flipstream said pin stadiums first. Let's turn it back on. And you guys will get to see one without the pin stadiums. But there are three other lights on this play field.
    70:59
    Yeah. It's 405 versus 6,000. I'm sorry. 405 versus 6,000. But the same is going to be true. The 405, the 6,000 is going to be sharper, even with the kit lens. People call them like the shit lenses because it's a lens that comes with a camera, but they're generally pretty good.
    71:19
    Yeah, I'm actually really happy with the kit lens on this. Yeah. They're pretty good.
    71:29
    They might not open up as far as a real kind of, you know, you're not going to get F1.8 on a kit lens sometimes. Yeah, but for a play field, I feel like you really don't want that. No, you want like 5-6. You want something a little... You don't want a single area of focus.
    71:50
    Okay, so is that enough time, I feel like, on this seeing movement to make the comparison? Yeah, I think so. Okay, so that is without the pin stadiums and three lights. I'm going to let this drain out. Now I'm going to I guess I can turn off another light And play another ball Why don't you turn off two more lights Two more lights Yeah, turn off two more lights Alright, so I've got one light on this playfield now Wow I feel like I can now tell which one is the 6,000 Final votes I'm in Yep
    72:34
    They're both running at 1080 60, correct? No, one of them is at 720 60 And one of them is at 1080 Which is fun Because I don't think anybody Can tell the difference You got 6,000 on the left All right.
    73:03
    Let's do it, George. Let's tell them what it is. All right. Dropping it, you guys. The right just auto-focused. Okay.
    73:12
    And here we go. Just another pinball stream. You ask, why only 720? Yes. A lot of us. Yeah. I feel like there was a little bit of back and forth, but because I don't think there's a difference. You can output at 1028, but what's actually doing the downscaling? And that's interesting because I couldn't get a response from OBS because the image that's being displayed across the canvas as a whole is 1080. So when you're taking something and reorienting it and downscaling it, there is something applying one of like the 10 really popular downscale algorithms and we don't know which one is being applied uh and and uh when when that happens in obs within a scene right like in the same way that you would resize an image you're resizing the the capture and and i feel like this demonstrates not only is it hard to tell which one cost six times more but but the one that the cx 405 is outputting at 720 so it's outputting at a lot less quality and and it was still hard to tell like it should have been you would think for the cost that went into the purchase of the a6000 that it should have been instantaneously uh uh i can't think of the appropriate term but you should have been able to tell very quickly which one was the one that you spent a lot more money on in my opinion and Kirk Hobbs says there is bugger all difference that Molly Hatchett says they both look great I do 1080p playfield cam as I have a scene with a playfield horizontal anonymous that makes absolute sense if you're going to go horizontal with it uh and you want to show that extra detail and you're outputting at 1080 absolutely and I do that with my a6000 uh the handycam I was gonna like I was in the process of adjusting it to 1080 and I'm like wait a second let me see what it looks like first and i struggled and manu was adamant about the right side being the a6000 i'm like you know what i'm leaving it because i feel like that's going to be a double kicker is that the right is a lesser costing camera and the output is at 720 instead of 1080 and you still can't tell the difference george you put the labels on the wrong images thank you pendetti i i did not though the a6000 is the left the cx45 is on the right oh there was a laugh afterward okay why use the facts when you have your feelings to be i'm saying that i'm saying okay um so i'm gonna flip it back over to the chat yeah flip tronic I'm at 6K. I have quality set on the encoder. I'm using the new, the H.264 NVENC new encoder. I have it set, I mean, regardless, the quality of the cameras shouldn't make too big of a, sorry, the quality of the bitrate. I guess if you're trying to compare 1080 to 720, whatever, I'm almost maxed out. I could go max quality, but I'm at quality, and that is about the only other thing I could potentially do. so the next time you're thinking about dumping a significant amount more money into the camera tech don't get don't get skewed by you know tech porn we love to buy stuff we love to buy stuff no idea what you're talking about there um we can put george in front of it we'll make him spend his money and then we'll take a look at whether we should spend our money um and uh like i said if you're made of money go for it But you can see right here, and what we talked about earlier, it's not all about that. So there you go. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, the fact that it wasn't immediately discernible. I think as you're watching pinball, you're so focused typically on the action. How often are you like, God, I wish I could see what was happening at that top left corner? or which is funny because right away fliptronic flipstream and al anonymous hit it right on the head that the top corners of the play field were better focused on the left as opposed to the right which should be a dead giveaway but there was still there was still i feel like a little a little back and forth yeah and you can take george's you can take george's hand-me-downs kirk hobbs i have sent off quite a few of the of the hand-me-downs out and i think your money is better spent with lighting. Kirk Hobbs!
    78:05
    Yes! Yes, lighting! Let me, really quick, really quick. I'm going back. You guys, let's just see. Here's one extra camera. Or sorry, one extra light. That's why we turned the lights off. Because we wanted to show you. There's two extra lights. Now we're at three lights right now. Let me show you. With five lights. What does this play field look like? Look at the difference! someone said the L word around George lighting is key I have the exposure on both of these cameras manually adjusted down considerably right now for this lighting situation so that way it can take all that beautiful image and transfer it up into the stream and as somebody pointed out I think this camera was zoomed in a little bit more there that that that should be slightly better maybe maybe this one should come in just a hair there you need to set the auto adjustment exposure before the streaming and then set to manual also you realize you should um you should zoom in with a 405 zoom in and then set focus and then zoom back out i'm not sure if you can know that oh you know i have found that most pins are okay with autofocus on the CX-405, but there are some like Star Trek where it flashes or does something and it messes with the autofocus and you get that.
    79:39
    That's why I always, when we were doing tournaments and we had to move around quickly, we always manually focused because when it focus breathes during, like Andrei Masenkov's amazing thing, you get everyone pissed and that focus breathes. So Flipstream brought up a really good one. And maybe for our follow-up data, like deep dive for episode seven, I really do want to jump into that, which is, is there a quality, a level, is there a playfield quality that detracts, that literally leads to less viewers?
    80:15
    Or slower follower growth, maybe is a good way to put that. and I feel like there is because I struggle to watch streams at 30 frames per second, but I'm also surprised sometimes by how good and fluid 30 frames per second can look with enough lighting, as we did during episode five of Second String where we looked at four different cameras and lighting scenarios, and the 920 was actually pretty awesome for pre-COVID prices of like 50 bucks. so pin daddy says stream outdoors during the day low budget streaming that's the best that's your best key light is the sun um uh i just want to tag what fliptronic said first of all fliptronic don't be so so so deprecating you and that's right um but yes wait you're agreeing with him or just have somebody with a big personality on the stream I am saying A, don't be self-deprecating and B, yes Oh, I hit the camera Okay Flipstream, FYI, my first stream that everyone thought looked amazing was only at 5 kilobits per second, oh, that reminds me somebody mentioned, if you get partnered you get, I think, an extra 2,000 bits to stream at, so you can stream at 8,000 at an 8,000 bit rate, as opposed to 6,000 And at that point, do you think the difference between outputting from a 720 to a 1080 might make a difference? And possibly. I would love to do those comparisons. What I would like to do, we have all these ideas for more second string episodes. I think we just need to do more of these. But what I, Alnonymous says no. That's really interesting. I agree with Alnonymous. In fact, we could just do it. Like, I could render something in Premiere at 6 and at 8. I'll just do a local recording to see if there's a difference. Yeah, and I agree with him. There's a point of diminishing returns at that stage. I think I would really like, by the way, to see... I'm going to switch this back over to chat. I would really like to see what a stream looks like. You can have all the best tech possible, but what does the stream look like at 6,000 bitrate, at 5,000, at 4,000, at 3,000, at 2,000, and show those differences, and then put it back up to 6,000 and adjust the encoder settings between super fast to see what that looks like, which is funny because I won't be able to see that. Only the stream. You're going to need the stream feedback in order to see those differences. And go very fast to fast to max performance to quality and max quality and adjust up and down all of those to see what you really get out of those settings and when it taxes your video card and CPU a little bit more as well.
    83:11
    um local recordings best quality do 720 at 60 at 5k but i like the push to 1080 yeah me too uh i know a good example of someone who would be super entertaining with the right minimal equipment who unfortunately is bottlenecked by their computer and has nothing but stuttering cams fliptronic that is that's that's awful to hear to to be limited like that on the on the tech side. It seems like yeah, like we've got to work.
    83:43
    Sorry, Winters, in all these scenarios, the main output is still 1080p, right? No. The main output has to be 60 frames per second or better. You can stream at 720 at 60 and be just fine. You don't have to be streaming at 1080. Yep. But the higher frame rate for the speedy ball running around the table is the key right there. and just in case people are using XSplit or different things George is talking specifically about OBS settings I'm sure XSplit has different ways of handling CPU usage and bitrate so that's kind of the same and thank you Pinball Daddy just coming down to personality and interacting with the stream that's the reason I feel like people go to Twitch if what you want to do is show off the game and be amazing but not interact I feel like YouTube is a really good place for you to record that content local, put it up online, edit it, right? Like, get to the key parts and maybe you can voice over and talk about what you were thinking and doing at that time. But if you're not, if you're not going to interact and engage with the audience, I feel like that's, that's the big thing that Twitch gives you. You know, you're watching a live, a live cast without, and able to interact with that person as they're doing it. So anyway, is there anything else, Manu, that you wanted to go over tonight? review?
    85:07
    Yeah, I don't think so. It's interesting that the conversation has drifted to personality, which I think we all get, right? George and I don't have to sit here and preach that if you launch your pinball stream and simply play pinball, look over at the chat, play pinball more, look over at the chat,
    85:27
    you're getting pretty much nowhere. Try and be you. just try and be you unless you're a jerk maybe that helps too maybe that does I feel like I was quoting a movie oh no I feel like I was quoting don't worry it's a bad quote not even gonna reference the quote that I was getting that from so unless you're Batman then you should be Batman thank you flipstream exactly yeah you got me out of that hole let me just shovel out of that one there so uh awesome unless you're a jerk oh man oh man that's unless you're a jerk george 2020 thank you uh cool guys that was second string episode six uh i love doing these i i i love chatting with manu and any opportunity i have to do it be it directly or on stream doing one of these i think is just a great time so uh i hope you guys enjoy it as much as at least i enjoy doing it i don't know that manu uh he actually enjoys doing these he might be like god i can't handle george anymore but i'm not going to give him an opportunity to even answer or respond to that question i'm just going to talk right over him so he doesn't have an opportunity and uh thank you so much if you have not given a follow to mpt3k please do so right now go to twitch.tv slash mpt3k click that follow button uh watch his streams he's amazing it's the the level of interaction that he has done with leon board which i'm going to keep pushing by the way to make an episode in the near future it is oh it's happening it's happening it's happening it is straight up mind-blowing it was fun i was uh casting from my phone to the big television the other day and jessica my my wife was watching and i'm like just watch this and i just went through and i redeemed 5,000 points. 5,000 points! And I activated everything at least once, and then I went through and changed the channel ten times in a row, so that way Manu wasn't actually on the camera for a good six or seven minutes. And Jess was dying laughing the whole time. I blew up his logo. I spun it. I switched around the orientation of all the components on his screen multiple times. You know what I did with all that Channel Redemption money.
    88:01
    What'd you do? That's right. I was going to say I bought my kids some Nike sneakers, but no, they do nothing. I don't get anything out of that. It's just fun. Yeah, it's fun, and it's just hours upon hours upon hours of work to set it all up. So to summarize, if you have not given MPT3K a follow, please do so. And on top of that, you guys, the Pinball Network, great collection of people. and even if it's not the pinball network there are a bunch of streamers in the chat right now because this stream is about streaming pinball for other pinball streamers everybody that is in chat here you can likely follow and should there are some big names in here there's some great names there's some up-and-coming streamers so go back through and and just everybody in here there's there's there's opportunity to find new content to fill up those little holes in the day where it feels like you're just unhappy and what you need is pinball-related entertainment and it's not there. But wait, it is because we're in COVID and everybody is streaming right now. So if you can't find someone to stream, go to the Pinball Category channel, look it up and just search and find someone, help them build their audience and let's just have fun building the community and making it more awesome. You guys have a great night and it's Sunday. Also have a better than awful Monday. See you guys.
    89:50
    you