I watched quite a few Overwatch videos on YouTube, but I don’t watch OWL.
Here is a short explanation of why: I’m interested in the actual games, and they are completely buried in “sports” aspect of OWL. There is no reason people like me can’t have a parallel batch of content from the same events.
How you could interest me in OWL
Again, I’m interested in the actual game. Learning how other people play it and how to be better at it myself.
I like to be able to choose what I watch and I don’t have time for live events. This means having some basic stats about each video would definitely help. Which maps were played? Who played which character?
I’m fine with ads, especially if they’re not disruptive, but I don’t like meaningless hype padding, like seeing players take their seats.
The chattering commentary just annoys me. I want to clearly hear game audio. It contains a lot of information not present in the visuals.
I usually want to see the game from players’ perspectives, not some weirdly controlled camera.
Now, I’m probably not your target audience - not a sports fan. But a lot of aspects of professional sports broadcasting are tied to how it worked on TV in 1970s-1990s. Television is a dying 20th century medium. Computers are the present and the future. This implies viewer control and interactivity.
One way I would possibly watch OWL events live is if I could see them through game’s engine, similar to “Spectate” option. With mutable commentary. It would be up to you to figure out where and how to put ads without making them overly annoying.
I actually love the commentary. The only real feature I would “love” would be the option to choose which player’s perspective I view the game from at any given time.
I realize that’s near impossible given tech limitations, but my god would I love it. Could learn so much about positioning and such on heroes that I actually play.
And admittedly, the DPS heroes do get loads of screen time already (even though I’d still personally prefer to watch 90% from a Tracer player’s PoV), but poor supports hardly see any screen time. Unless Mercy’s in Valk, her PoV is hardly shown. So I can see support mains loving this feature as well.
Do you have cable? Satellite? If so, I hate to inform you, but most everything you watch can be watched for a fraction of the cost on the internet–which you’re probably already paying for. Heck, some stations (HBO, CW come to mind) have their own apps for watching their shows at your leisure.
Though I agree with you, OP, I think all of these features would be hard to implement on Twitch and would mean Blizzard has to create their own streaming site.
This would probably not be worth the hassle as the OWL is still immensely popular and I don’t think the extra viewers would amount to much profit.
Many families gather around Netflix to watch shows, or movies. On a TV.
When people say TV is dying, they mean in terms of how it’s ran now. Cable, broadcasting companies, etc. TVs ain’t going anywhere, not with the inclusion of smart TVs, which connect to the internet and various streaming apps to watch shows on.
And when Radio ‘died’, it died in the sense that people are no longer sitting around it for news, as they use to. Now, people listen to the radio on the way to work (if they don’t use their phone for music via bluetooth). Hardly anyone sits in their house listening to the radio nowadays, and this divide has been furthered with the introduction of music apps (spotify, iTunes, etc).
Technology will always put to bed what it came before. That’s just how advancement is.
But radio is a dying medium? Have people not heard of, like CDs? That already helped invalidate radio; however, since then, we have created digital music, and before you know it, you can plug in phones and play whatever music regardless of owning it or not. Before long, radio will only exist to host talk-shows because anyone listening to music is listening to good music.
