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BGonline.org Forums
NYC Metro Open Main Event Finals Streaming Mini Rant
Posted By: Stick
Date: Thursday, 11 January 2024, at 7:49 p.m.
So let me stipulate some things so at the end of the day hardly any more people hate me than already do. I'm not in the loop. I haven't attended and played in a backgammon tournament in years upon years. Perhaps some of my views or items of note will be dead wrong. Even when I did attend tournaments I certainly wasn't locked in to how streaming worked. I know Bill and Tara do a lot of excellent streaming for tournaments nowadays and Ben Friesen helps out often.
For the NYM Open Finals the only streaming I saw was USBGF & Voice of BG pages They were both the same stream.
To kick it off the match had already started when the stream finally got going. What's the big deal you ask? You miss a few moves of an hour + long final, so what? Well, if you happen to be trying to input the match it sure makes things a lot tougher. Luckily they were only a few moves in and thanks to years of Nack Ballard practice, I was able to easily find a likely scenario that got us to where it started.
Next we had the names on the stream being inverted so that Dennis showed as Wilcox and vice versa. This was noticed early on by someone watching and corrected. Thing is, when you have to correct things on stream you now temporarily have to move away from the stream to do that. Also, when you're correcting on screen with the match still showing it's jumbly.
And we keep rolling with ... the glare! To me it seems like it's 2024 and we've been doing streaming for quite a while now so we should have figured out how to not have such bad glare on the dice so that all too often the commentators can't tell what the dice are and therefore the people watching can't tell what the dice are. It's especially frustrating for those of us who like to play along when watching a match. I pick my moves when possible before the players make their moves but if I can't tell what they rolled it's pretty hard to do.
I know these things may seem nit picky and if it was only one of the aforementioned items I'd let it slide. When you have multiple little annoyances though I think they should be addressed so in the future we can do better.
Finally, the commentators. Look, I never want to discourage anyone from actively promoting backgammon if it's a net positive however I think for the streaming finals of the NYM Open we need to do better. Everyone has their preferences for commentators so maybe people won't agree with me but the combination of Phil + Larry is not strong enough. Phil is well known, excellent for color commentary, but I think he needs a strong partner to keep things on the rails. Larry's commentary would be good for beginner players but having these two together and some of the nonsense that came out of their mouths shouldn't be allowed in one of the US's original 13 colonies.
I do realize that finding people to do commentary at times can be tough. Sometimes people are still in matches themselves, sometimes people have already left the tournament, sometimes people simply don't want to do commentary for a variety of reason which are all valid given the current pay rate of commentators. For the finals a lot of people should be done with their own matches and given the participants I would think a lot of players would want to watch the match anyway. I find it hard to believe we couldn't have found a better combo. It seems to me that Larry may have been the only one to provide streaming for the tournament as all the USBGF videos I can see are from Larry himself. If that's the case it's hard to give him the boot if he wants to be on air for the finals.
Streaming is costly. I don't know the cost offhand but buying all the equipment, lugging it around the US, setting up at tournaments, etc...is a hassle to say the least. I am still surprised though the USBGF (or some other person/entity?) hasn't found a way to provide quality streaming for all the major US tournaments. Then again, I'm surprised with the BGO hiatus no other free forum popped up to promote bg. Even more surprised that people went to Facebook to get their bg fix and want to stay there. Varnick. I'm still surprised we don't have a respected universal spot (like Gridgammon) for people to play backgammon in real time online run by the USBGF. All rants to revisit another day though I suppose.
Stick
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