Streaming Second Life to Youtube and why I’d like LL to add it as a feature

Tags

"second life", PR, promotion, streaming, video, youtube

Streaming games to Youtube is big business.

People all over the world broadcast their game playing online and some make a pretty good living out of it.
Millions of viewers enjoy seeing someone else play a game and in many cases it can entice them into buying the actual game, so game publishers are very happy with all this free advertising.

Game videos have now gotten so big that Youtube now has its special gaming channel.

Second Life also gets a lot of attention on Youtube as well but unfortunately most of these videos are far from good publicity for our virtual world.

Some are meant well but completely alienating to most outsiders (try and explain having a baby in virtual reality) and others just enjoy using Second Life to annoy and harass others and create grieving videos.
The latter apparently being very funny to a huge audience as those seem to get the most attention.

It clearly is important for Second Life to improve its reputation, at least on youtube.
Many people watch these videos and I doubt it makes them want to try SL.

So today I decided to try and stream a bit of SL myself.
For the record, I was using my early 2015 model Macbook Pro and Firestorm on a wireless connection, broadcasting trough Wirecast.
I did not bother to tweak the settings or look into many options, it was just a simple first try.

And I must say that it worked rather well but it can be quite a hassle.

The thing is, you need to tweak bit rate and CPU and keep an eye on all sorts of settings before you find the perfect balance between making it look good and broadcast smoothly.
My CPU pretty much went to the max right away.

SL runs pretty decent on my 2015 Macbook Pro but when the region is laggy and there is a crowd, things slow down and using shadows and such is pretty much out of the question in such situations.
Even people with very good computers often set their viewers only on ultra for making pictures.
But if you can’t show SL at its very best, it is sometimes better to not show it at all.

Spending a lot of time figuring out how to best set everything up is something which many users will not be willing to do or they may not even be able to.
In short, there is no plug & play option.
No “Lets just click broadcast and we’re fine” possibility.

And this is something where LL could perhaps offer their users a really cool service.
One that I’d love to see in Second Life but sort of expect to see in Sansar.

First of all why should LL bother?
As I mentioned, I think it is important to ‘flood’ the media with great images and videos of Second Life, with the best possible quality.
There is no better antidote to the idea that a lot of people still have about SL having bad graphics and has abandoned ugly old sims than showing people how SL can look like.
If LL gets one of the famous youtube gamers to try out SL, they could reach an audience of millions.
Something you’ll pay a fortune for in advertising money.

Also, LL is always trying to get people to become premium members and to be fair, besides getting extra groups, so far they have not offered amazing extras that people got really excited about.
The added option to create or even broadcast video directly from the viewer could be a wonderful incentive for people to become a premium member.

In short; it is in LL’s interest to get lots of good looking and interesting footage out there.

Now, I am not very technical and have no idea what is happening inside Linden Lab, unlike some people seem to think, I am not a regular visitor there, I do not have my own luxury suite and they found all the bugs I hid there.
So my following ideas may be daft or completely impossible.

But, in my perfect world, Linden Lab adds a ‘record’ and/or ‘stream’ button to their viewer that, just like the ‘upload to flickr’ function will allow us to very simply and directly record a video or stream it on youtube.
It would also be nice to have an option to hide the interface but only on the video, not on the actual screen so you can still use the buttons and options but this will not end up op the actual video or stream.
You also have this option in the photo making tool, you tell it to hide the interface on the picture, but you still see it on your screen.

As simple as that.
Of course this may be quite tricky, or even hellish for LL to implement, but I reckon it might be worth it as it would flood the internet with SL videos.

And if only LL could help out the Bright Canopy team or bring the former SL Go team on board and sort out a cheap streaming service for all… then we could start broadcasting amazing high quality videos and show the world what Second Life can look like.

This screenshot may look nice but with everything set to ultra, it became rather laggy.

Why the banning of Second Life by Twitch is nonsense

Tags

"second life", gaming, online, streaming, twitch, video

Twitch is a website that allows you to broadcast video of whatever game you’re playing and when a while back a few people decided to start streaming (thats what kids these days call it) Second Life, the company was shocked and horrified.

Because apparently there is nudity in Second Life.
Did you know that?
It’s news to me.

They banned Second Life because it violates their Terms of Service / Rules of conduct.
They also prohibit all versions of games rated Adults-Only according to the ESRB’s Rating Guide.

Now lets see how this applies to Second Life.
I think SL has not been rated by the ‘Entertainment Software Rating Board’, I can’t find it there yet.
Maybe if Linden Lab could get it classified and if they have competent staff there, we could get a sophisticated and sensible rating.

If ESRB would rate it adult, it, according to the ESRB website this would classify the game as;

ADULTS ONLY
Content suitable only for adults ages 18 and up. May include prolonged scenes of intense violence, graphic sexual content and/or gambling with real currency.

Maybe it is just me, but that is not my Second Life.
Except for a riot on Mayday, there is very rarely intense violence in 1920s Berlin and as I never visit the local brothel (the action happens on another sim) there is no graphic sexual content in 1920s Berlin (as long as you don’t spy on people in the privacy of their bedroom) and there’s no gambling to be seen, honest gov’nor, I never touched those dice.

These things are also not part of the sims I visit.
Sometimes someone’s clothes don’t rez, but Twitch writes;

Sexually explicit acts or content: Nudity can’t be a core focus or feature of the game in question and modded nudity is disallowed in its entirety. Occurrences in game are okay, so long as you do not make them a primary focus of your stream and only spend as much time as needed in the area to progress the game’s story.

Someone’s clothes not rezzing to me is a glitch, a lag related issue, not something someone does on purpose.
And outside our nudists corner at the beach in a neighbouring region, seeing nude people is rare.
Either way it is not the core or focus of the “game”.

You may mention griefing, sure that still happens in Second Life although generally it is rare, at least as part of my Second Life.
The sim I live in has capable managers who eject or even ban someone, often before they even get to the actual sim.
The last time I was seriously griefed by someone is years ago and the only reason I couldn’t do anything about it was because I had a duty towards my tenants to keep an eye on this person, otherwise simply muting him would have solved it.

I know that videos about griefing and adult entertainment in Second Life has flooded sites like youtube, but that simply does not represent SL as it is to many of its users.

In short, I could easily stream Second Life directly to the internet without there being a risk of nudity, kinky hanky panky, graphic violence, etc.

If I wanted to, I could make a SL video with all those naughty things in it, true.
And I wouldn’t mind Twitch not allowing that.
But I could make videos like that with a lot of other games Twitch does allow…

So not only does their ruling on Second Life not make any sense, it is hypocritical.

Just look at the games they do allow; Minecraft, Counter Strike, The Witcher, GTA 5, etc, etc.
These games CAN have nudity and sex in them, if the gamer wants to.
In GTA 5 it is even a pre-programmed part of it, you can hire a prostitute for a bit of action in your car and then violently murder her.
Which, apparently is fine.

To me some of these games are also a school example of containing “prolonged scenes of intense violence”.
Trust me I know.
I am the equivalent of a 42 year old soccer mum (even though I luckily don’t have kids and if I did I wouldn’t let them play soccer and by the way it is called FOOTBALL), one of the least likely people to be a hardcore gamer.
Yet I regularly play violent games, just the other day I was sniping Hitler in the face.

So, in short, they allow plenty of games that allow adult content in one way or another and banning Second Life for those rules, makes no sense.
They could and should ban individual users who stream such SL content or stuff like that from the games they do allow.

Do we care?
No not really, I never even heard of Twitch till very recently, I don’t really see the entertainment value of streaming game videos and there are other options out there.
Personally I prefer edited videos that show the interesting bits of games or virtual worlds, not just gameplay.

Nevertheless, Twitch is being hypocritical, and I’m allergic to that.
I’m also annoyed when the reputation of Second Life is being dragged trough the dirt again.
Sorry to disappoint everyone but there is no adult content, nudity, griefing or hardcore violence EVERYWHERE in Second Life.
I’ve only witnessed particle griefing once in the last couple of years and people from all over came to have a look.
But seek and ye shall find.

Just because it CAN be part of SL, doesn’t mean it ALWAYS IS part of SL.
And that is the same with some of the games they do allow.

The only thing that should matter is;

Can you easily stream SL onto the internet and avoid nudity, hanky panky and graphic violence?
Yes.
Can you easily stream SL onto the internet without breaking the Twitch rules?
Yes.
Ipso Facto; Twitch is talking nonsense.

The SL Go interview; past, present and future of cloud streaming Second Life

Tags

"second life", cloud, sl go, SLGo, streaming

In todays ‘Drax Files Radio Hour’ we air an interview with Dennis Harper, Sr. Product Manager of SL Go.  The SL streaming service that recently announced it would not continue after Sony bought important patents from OnLive, making it impossible to continue the service.

In the interview Dennis talks about how SL Go came to be, the future he imagined for it a, how the SL Go community grew and how SL Go got a huge boost at the very last moment thanks to the inworld paying option.
I’d love to see Linden Lab put that in Second Life, allowing us to pay our tier and premium fee inworld!

About the sale Dennis says that Sony never intended to own or run the service, they were only interested in the intellectual property and patterns. Buying these meant Onlive simply had to stop in their tracks.

Onlive was put on the market because it was not profitable, but they were getting close to turning this around. Cloud steaming itself is a very good business but it just took a lot of investment, time and effort to get the customers they needed.
The long time yield over a customer was just not enough and as Dennis describes it; Onlive just ran out of runway and money.

Onlive was ahead of its time, like Second Life once was.
Dennis feels that they could have made it an incredibly viable business if they had had another year or two. Cloud gaming is the future. Onlive had been looking for a buyer for some time, several parties were interested and some of them did want to take over and run the service, but in the end they decided to sell to Sony.

Linden Lab did show some interest in SL Go and did come to discuss the service, but I personally don’t think they actually made an offer.
Dennis said that Linden Lab and OnLive had some discussions on closer business partnerships, but nothing solid ever came from it.  Ultimately, OnLive might not have been the best solution for Linden Lab, as Second Life represents hundreds of thousands of potential users.  OnLive has a great service, but that number of users may have swamped them.  However, OnLive was actively working on new technology that would allow for this volume of users.  If given time, he is confident that OnLive would have solved that problem.

But the end of SL Go does not have to mean the end of streaming Second Life.
I’ve written before about how I felt LL should offer SL Go as a free or cheap service for premium members and it seems they actually did look into this.

One option could be the service Amazon hosts called ‘Amazon Appstream’, something I never heard of before till I read about it on Inara Pey’s blog.
Amazon has lots and lots of servers all over the world that are far from being really pushed to their limit. Most of the time they even stand idle. Linden Lab could perhaps rent those servers. It is at least something Linden Lab should look at and perhaps experiment with.

Dennis thinks that Linden Lab has now realised the possibilities of streaming SL and what it means to many users and potentially many more people who use their virtual world. Thanks to SL Go, SL finally worked on mobile devices and finally looked good.

Dennis also mentions that now that SL will soon no longer be supported for people using  XP or Vista OS on their computer.
These users, according to a reputable source at least 40-50.000 people, will soon be stuck on older viewers, unable to update to any new feature SL introduces and eventually making it impossible for them to use it.To them SL Go was a (second) life safer.

They will be left in the cold and so will those of us who can’t afford the big computers you need to run SL the way it should be running; with awesome graphics and no lag.

Forget about Sony. If you want to enjoy SL the way you did with SL Go you need to ask Linden Lab, they are the only ones who could get this done.

Personally I think that SL Go has proven that streaming Second Life works, that there is a market for it, that it means a lot to many SL users and that it could have a drastic effect on the reputation of our virtual world by flooding the internet with amazing high quality graphics and eventually perhaps even machinima.
Linden Lab is going to look running the Next Generation Second Life on mobile devices anyway, so it would be a good idea for them to start experimenting with streaming Second Life now and use that experience to make NGSL even better.

So the ball is in Linden Lab’s corner. They are the ones that could bring back SL streaming and I think they should. Linden Lab has the talent and the technology and the former SL Go staff have the know-how and experience. I also think that if they work together on building something from scratch that will just concentrate on streaming SL, there would be no issues regarding the patents Onlive sold to Sony.

SL Stream will improve SL for a lot of users and may even find a way to get more of them to sign up as premium members or even “Plus Premium” members who’ll pay a little more for the streaming service.

So forget about Sony and politely, patiently and friendly tell Linden Lab why you think streaming SL is a good idea.

Make sure you catch the interview in todays Drax Files broadcast, you can listen to it by clicking here.

To end this article, I’m sharing a few quotes, stories and opinions from SL Go users about what the loss of this service means to them and why it is important to try and find or create an alternative.

Melissa Ussy
OMG i had no idea water was SUPPOSED TO look that way!!!!

Adrian Mondrian
“I’d been hoping to get my mom into Second Life soon. She’s coming to visit me next month, and a tablet would have been a much more feasible purchase right now than a high-end laptop, for both financial as well as technical reasons. With SL Go gone, our options are more limited. I still want to introduce her to the world somehow — I actually think she’d love SL once she got used to it, especially since she feels quite isolated where she’s currently living — but it becomes a more complicated undertaking and not nearly as “accessible” an experience for her as it could otherwise have been.”

Elrik Merlin
I think the loss of this service is a great shame. Although I don’t know how popular the service was, I am sure there are quite a few users who will now no longer be able to access SL, and a great potential for expanding the reach of virtual worlds to people with almost any kind of end-user device, is being lost – at a time when the whole business of virtual reality is getting additional attention and environments like SL are being shown to be a decade ahead of the curve, and when increasingly tablets and mobile devices are increasingly the internet access equipment of choice.

Selena
I am an estate owner and pay the premium membership. Normally I use my own computer to run SL but recently my mother had a life altering surgery that has required me to move in with her and use her new but not meant for graphics computer. SL GO has allowed me to continue to service my estate and keep in touch with my residents. The closing down of SL GO will be a hard blow indeed.

Aelggyva Fenwitch (Effy)
Once i saw what Second life and its many artists and creators meant me to see in previously unattainable graphic settings my virtual life underwent a major change . I was able to visit some astounding visual creations and interact with other visitors in a much more rewarding way.
I am really not looking forward to returning to my virtual life which consists of walking through treacle surrounded by grey blocks.

DevinVaughn
With SL Go, I could be film maker. The frame rates were smooth while normally my computer skips. …And I could do it with advanced lighting too. I could also do amazing things like waltz into the super busy The Arcade sim, and yard sale hunt at Epic without choking on all those avatars, textures, and meshes densely populating a small area. … I even figured out how to use SL Go for my blog photos. SL Go photography saved the day but when I would otherwise crash trying to get the shot. (Yes, I was brutal with SL Go photography, pushing it past it’s limits with ultra advanced lighting, 16x anti aliasing, and trying to do a larger image size than double my screen resolution and it would crash on me of course. lol) But when I needed fast and reliable, SL Go photography was there for me. … I had big plans to use SL Go for my coverage of Fantasy Faire. I was planning to make movies while the sims were crawling with people, filming them all in thier wonderful and wacky outfits, and I would do all it on Ultra settings too. …. It sent me reeling that something so useful, SL Go, was taken away suddenly without warning and no way to fill void left behind. …. SL Go was a great tool and I enjoyed having it. I hope in the future there will be new ways to solve the problems of making VR faster, stable, able to handle busy sims, be beautifully lit, and of course, do it while waiting in line at doctor office or sitting on the beach.

A.
I used singularity – graphics setting as low as they’d go, a draw of 32 – max avis 3 at the most – often 2, so i could see my partner and i dance.
In crowded places, i looked like a whirling dervish – i couldn’t control my movement and anyone moving in front of me took my fps from 7 – SEVEN mind you, at the best – to 2 and i’d crash. You can’t run a venue like that.
Then sl go and FS – and i became so dependent SO very quickly.
I’m so crushed – and i know from using it again now, that singularity is if possible going to continue to be worse.
I’m looking at closing both venues, and leaving second life – i can’t afford a new box.
Maybe going to InWorldz to see if it’s better there, that’s what losing sl go means to me. The fact that i’ve never seen a framerate over 10 in my three years in sl says it all, i think.

Ali V
It means i have to buy or build a new computer in order to continue being on sl.
LL is out “tech’ing” themselves from mainstream people.

Sarah Snow
It means the end of SL as it should be experienced.  for me at least

Jaska BloodMoon
It means my fiancée will be unable to join me in SL until sometime down the road when I’m capable of breaking free from the chains instilled by bills and bloated prices, and finally buy a better laptop that she can use.

Ed Merryman
well it does mean that I won’t be able to use my xp pc for sl much longer,, but LL won’t be worried about that 😛

Jaska BloodMoon
It’s bad enough that I have more money going out to bills than I have coming in right now, paying a bloated price just to stream a viewer so that my laptop can run it just isn’t in the cards for me, at least not at the moment. That’s why I liked OnLive as an option, paying by Linden took quite a bit of weight off my shoulders.
The hardest thing for people right now is that Second Life is changing and becoming more and more demanding of computers. A low to mid-range computer that used to be able to run SL is now barely able to function properly, and these low to mid-range computers are “new” computers that are literally obsolete right out of the box. Most people can’t afford to pay a one lump sum for a high-end rig, especially when the rigs that are capable of running SL the way it’s meant to be run is well over 1 to 2,000 USD. x.x Some folks could probably afford that and save up for it rather quickly, but with so many places price gouging on their Internet services or electric, or what have you, bills just aren’t permitting for some folks. Some of SLs residents draw a monthly disability in RL, and SL is pretty much their reality, and it’s a reality that they can’t truly enjoy.  -shrug- Just my thoughts.

Katy
for me the effect personally is negligible except when i’m away from home and have to use my laptop.  But what bothers me is the large number of people who have had their first experience of being able to see and function in SL as it is meant to be, and will no longer have that ability.