Yes, but it was the overarching strategy to focus on rapid response, to allow staffers independence, to allow the use of Twitter and similar, that differentiated the Democrats from the Republicans

"Close, but not quite. You come up with a goal and overall strategy and make sure everyone understands them. Then you split the overall goal up into smaller goals and assign those out to lower level units that will meet them; continue splitting it up at lower and lower levels until every soldier understands his goal and how it contributes to the overall goal. Then you allow each level to adjust as needed to succeed."

What you are describing is the overall flow from strategic through operational down to tactical level, and that's not what I was discussing. I was discussing strictly within the strategic level. If the premises you based your plan on changes, you need contingency plans, and to adapt between them, and sometimes improvise. Let's hop to the military...

You are the commander of an army and responsible for one sector of a front. In your sector, there are three bridges that can handle 100 ton loads(think MBT on trailer behind a mover). Strictly on a strategic level, you need different strategic level contingency plan to deal with a destroyed bridge and how it affects your deployed forces, and those plans will have to take into account which bridge is destroyed etc. Or, your line of supply is dependant on a few bridges BEHIND you. What strategic contingency plans do you have to deal with sabotage units managing to blow up one or more? Keep in mind, 90+% of strategy is logistics, i.e what goes where.

Despite what hipsters think, Twitter is just a sideshow to what's really on display here, namely something that's been a staple of military leadership training for a loong time.

One of the first rules of war is: A plan of battle never survives first contact with the enemy unchanged.

The lesson in the above statement is that you can't just draw up a single grand plan, and stick to it no matter what. The reality is that any plan will always contain elements of estimates and guesswork. Therefore you make plans for different eventualities, and learn to adapt between different plans, and even drawing up new plans based on what you've learned.

In this case, the Republicans stuck to a single grand plan, with carefully scripted events. The democrats had a grand plan that outlined the goals needed, initial plans, and separate plans to adapt to unfolding events.

Twitter was just one tool in a large toolbox to achieve the above, and is in itself nothing special. Similar things have been spread via email, SMS, etc etc before, in other countries.

Just because there are that many people logging onto Steam every day does not equate to that many people being interested in viewing game streams.

And, as I said, but you ignored, CSGO was only one of the games going on at Dreamhack alone, and probably the one with the smallest playerbase. Total concurrent viewership was easily well over a million, just on the officially counted streams. Then there were the TV channels, in-game etc(Valve already has GOTV and DOTATV, so you can watch in-game).

Likewise, the grand finals for League of Legends reached a total of 27M unique viewers according to Riot, with peak concurrent viewers reaching above 11M, although Riot has a shady way of inflating viewer count, by embedding the stream in loading screens etc.

But, you are also facing the psychological factor I mentioned in the previous post: Most casual gamers just don't care about watching a single individuals stream, it's the ones that are already hardcore fans that bring in the money. It's like running a café, or a bar, or a club. You can place it in a highly populated area, yet without something to entice them, you will not attract many customers.

Right, as if that's any harder with a radiolink... Quite a stupid statement

Radio is slow compared to fibre, it's prone to disruptions from weather and EMI, and, it's actually quite expensive too, in a situation like this.

I think you vastly overestimate the theoretical viewerbase. Tournaments probably attract MORE casual gamers than dedicated player/non-tournament game streams. Comparison with real sports: The hardcore fans will watch every single league game, will watch qualification matches, will watch training sessions etc(this is very common in racing), the casuals will tune in for major tournaments, or the race itself etc. My brother watches football games every week, I watch the European Championship and the World Championship basically. Otoh, he watches a F1 or WEC race from time to time, I go to races, watch practice and quali sessions etc etc(Let's just say that the week for Le Mans 24 hours is grueling.... :p ).

That will most probably NOT change just because it's computer games.

The viewers are from all over the world including the US and Canada(And keep in mind, while CSGO was going on, there were still other games being played and streamed/broadcasted).

I didn't say it was completely mainstream. However, unlike what the poster I replied to claimed, it's not only hardcore gamers that care about the competition in tournaments. Casual gamers flock to watch the tournaments, including them people who wouldn't really call themselves gamers.

Otoh, in the nordic countries at least, we have a many centuries long tradition of playing games, even as adults, and most of the swedish religious extremists pissed off across the atlantic. Those protestants with their eternal penitence-based work "ethic" did see playing games as something frivolous and ungodly, and since so many of those aspect underly US culture at least that could explain some of the wide discrepancy.

(And with games I don't just mean gambling, or games like chess, but also physical games, such as team sports. Even nobility occassionally engaged in team sports up until late 18th century, though those sports had a more martial theme)

TV? Who's bothering with that crap? I'm talking about watching it in a player on one of my 1080p monitors. No amount of filtering will properly compensate for that low quality, even in native resolution.

As for someone behind the times, maybe you should take a look at your old equipment.

I tried Skyrim with Steam Broadcast, your Virtualdub approach, OBS and Xsplit. 720p, 2500kbit/s bitrate. 30 FPS, using otherwise default presets, and on my system(i5-2500 and 750 Ti, 8GiB RAM), I had no FPS loss, no stutter, and there was no major difference in CPU impact. What might impact you on your older CPU is the memory speed, if Steam captures at a default higher rate before encoding.

Many of these viewers are casual gamers. That's what you have to understand.

Gaming is no longer the 80's and 90's isolated circles. Games like Counter-Strike, DotA2, Starcraft 2 has reached way beyond that in terms of spectatorship. I don't actually play Starcraft 2 at all, but I still watch matches from time to time. I don't play DotA 2 or CS:GO other than sporadically, yet I watch tournaments etc.

In fact, the casual gamers will pull in less money, due to being less appealing to the general public, and people not as willing to pay to watch that. And if the casuals have to pay to stream, then your service is stillborn, unfortunately.

Ok, so grainy stamp quality.

Did you use similar settings in Steam Broadcast, or did you leave at default, which is 2500kbit/s and 720p?

Eh, just the CSGO finals at Dreamhack this weekend had over 400k viewers just via officially counted streams, then there were a lot of viewers via GOTV. Some swedish media had their own streams from Dreamhack. Also, swedish and finnish TV channels broadcast some of the matches too... So, there are a lot of people watching.

The biggest DotA2 event, The International, featured not tickets to access the streams, but a compendium and bonus items that tracked various stats through the tournament. Half of the price of the compendium boosted the prize pool for the event, and that prize pool became several million dollars so, there are a lot of viewers.

So what encoder settings do you use with virtualdub, and what settings?

I didn't notice any worse performance with this over using OBS(which is built on top of x264) or Xsplit, which are the two I otherwise use. If anything, Stream Broadcast at the same bitrate and target resolution was slightly less taxing for my i5-2500

I'm not so sure. Take GOTV/DotATV as examples. Tournaments can fund themselves by tickets(and many do) to watch the matches in-game(with commentators streamed in-game if you so choose). If that option extends to Steam Broadcast in the future, many tournaments would possibly keep Twitch only as a stream on the side, and focus on the Steam Broadcast, because that's where they could make most of their money, through tickets, store items etc, instead of a small margin on Twitch's advertising profits.