What do you think of doing an online anime convention?

[Kame-Sen'nin]

personally think this is a cool idea, one suited nicely for the cold winter months to stave off cabin fever, etc. I agree that perhaps 'convention' isn't the right terminology - the term I see bandied about is "webinar" which is just an awkward mutant of a word, but what this is is more like an online seminar or presentation. Webcast.

My pal Weds was involved in an online "convention" last year I think, which sounded similar to what's proposed here- people would webcast themselves speaking on a topic and viewers would participate via the chat window, and it took place over a weekend on a specific channel.

This sounds pretty cool; I think this is definitely worth pursuing. Sure, we may face a few technical hurdles, but I'm sure it's nothing we can't figure out.

[Drew_Sutton]

I've always liked the idea of utilizing streaming or even flat-out recording for convention panels; I tried to work in a method in which we could leverage streams/recording when I was directing a small anime convention here in Atlanta but ran into a lot of tech-debt really quickly because we were tied into a physical location and physical event-space-features. I tend to watch a lot of computer/network security conferences doing recordings of talks/research presentations once they are posted to a conference site or YouTube because I often can't make it to the conferences itself. I think one of the bigger technology conferences, Chaos Computer Congress, streams a lot of stuff live but they leave the recordings available. Having panels recorded so they could be watched later could be game-changing but I don't think fandom-centered conventions are really there yet.

All that said - divorcing the concept from a physical location, to me, opens a lot of doors and reduces a ton of overhead. Utilizing an existing platform, say Twitch, continues to drive the overhead down. Honestly, Twitch's reputation as a "Let's Play" platform (though there are lots of other games programming there: one of my former colleagues used to watch Magic: The Gathering on there) makes it a good place to broadcast panels: able to capture multiple screens (so you can broadcast presentations, clips, whatever, while you are speaking and you can have a camera on you), broad-platform that it web and app based, making it more widely available and viewers can hop-in, hop-off whenever there is content they don't want to watch (and will theoretically lead to less disappointed "attendees").

Here are the challenges/opportunities I see:
* Panelist "training" and Preparation - build guide of required equipment, how to set up/run a session. Bad/Unprepared panelists make for bad cons, regardless if they're in cyberspace or meatspace. Case in point, I am familiar with how Twitch works but don't have the first clue on what I need to run my own channel.
* Synchronizing The Stream: Single convention account that panelists sign into and streams shift at timeslots or a collective of individual channels with links for "attendees" to jump channel to channel?
* Managing Content: Since "Shouty-Man LP" is a genre unto itself, I am sure that there are few blockers in place for language but what about other adult content? How do we restrict the under-18s from getting into the Porn panel? Do we ban the porn all-together?'m most familiar with'm most familiar with
* What happens if it gets too big?: Chances are driving traffic to a third-party host will not hit the "hey, let's pay you kickbacks as sponsored content creators" threshold right away but could instead hit the "you're using a lot of bandwidth/weird traffic flows, so we're gonna kill your streams" first. Granted, this might take a couple of iterations to hit.
* Market? No one wants to present to an empty room.

All and all, I think it's a really cool idea and I'd be happy to scrape a couple of panel presentations together for it.

[SteveH]

I'm not at all any sort of expert with the streaming thing, but I have participated in one and "attended" or "viewed' or whatever a few others, and it seems that, for the "attendees" at least, the system requirements are pretty much the same system requirements for viewing any sort of streaming media. The technical stuff gets more finicky for the broadcasters, certainly. But Steve, if you're able to watch streaming anime, you should be able to at least watch and comment upon a streaming-video cast.

I personally think this is a cool idea, one suited nicely for the cold winter months to stave off cabin fever, etc. I agree that perhaps 'convention' isn't the right terminology - the term I see bandied about is "webinar" which is just an awkward mutant of a word, but what this is is more like an online seminar or presentation. Webcast.

My pal Weds was involved in an online "convention" last year I think, which sounded similar to what's proposed here- people would webcast themselves speaking on a topic and viewers would participate via the chat window, and it took place over a weekend on a specific channel.

Except I really don't watch streaming anime or anything. My streaming looks like 2002, with the jitters, the buffering, the stutter, the freezing. What I get online I grab and watch offline. If my system can't grab it, I don't watch it.

[Drew_Sutton]

What I get online I grab and watch offline. If my system can't grab it, I don't watch it.

What are you looking for in file formats/types? File sizes? Distribution - direct download or distributed download (like BitTorrent or some other P2P)?

I ask because, from a provider-infrastructure side, live-stream is the big challenge - serving for download is a lot simpler. It makes the most sense that if you can present the content live, that there should be recordings made available for both stream and download. But if a a provider like Twitch is selected, can videos be saved later? My understanding (and probably way outdated) is that videos are recorded live and archived only for some period of time (24 hours or a week) nor am I aware of a direct download interface. But hey, I could be way mistaken.

[usamimi]

It def sounds like an interesting idea. Would all the feeds have to be watched live, or would people be free to watch things they missed later? I know companies like Viz, etc have streamed their panels online to watch without having to log into a site or whatnot... I wonder what kind of software they use for those?

[DKop]

I know Twitch has it available to hold onto past streams on a channel up to about a week or so, so that should give people time to see it on there. Also, you can export a stream over to a youtube channel, which is what I just did with my play through of Snatcher recently.

It would be cool to figure out how to get people from the anime industry on this to talk about upcoming products they want to promote or even do a live QnA session. I think it wouldn't hurt to email some large companies about our idea and get feedback on what kind of software they use when it comes to hosting streams, and the tech detail behind what we would need to get something like this working.

[SteveH]

What I get online I grab and watch offline. If my system can't grab it, I don't watch it.

What are you looking for in file formats/types? File sizes? Distribution - direct download or distributed download (like BitTorrent or some other P2P)?

I ask because, from a provider-infrastructure side, live-stream is the big challenge - serving for download is a lot simpler. It makes the most sense that if you can present the content live, that there should be recordings made available for both stream and download. But if a a provider like Twitch is selected, can videos be saved later? My understanding (and probably way outdated) is that videos are recorded live and archived only for some period of time (24 hours or a week) nor am I aware of a direct download interface. But hey, I could be way mistaken.

I would say mp4, direct download, anything larger than 800 meg should be broken down into .RAR compressed files, self stitching. (probably the wrong term. Say it's a 1.5 gig file broken into 6 .RAR files. Should be generated so that after downloading all 6 you simply click on the first one and it all unpacks into the original)

Reason being, as far as I can tell ANYONE, regardless of system, if you can download it regardless of how long it takes, you can uncompress it and watch it.

That's my take