Gaming
New platform D!ngIt.tv is working hard to topple Twitch dominance for eSports tournaments.
You may not have heard of it and you’ll certainly struggle to spell it, but D!ngIt is a game broadcasting service that has been quietly toiling in the background, plugging in servers and cleaning out internet tubes and whatever else streaming sites need to do. Now, with the arrival of the Spring season of many eSports games, the team behind it have pushed all the big red buttons and are even offering weekly tournaments of their own.
The small, microtournament format brings CS:GO, Dota, StarCraft, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone players a chance to earn a regular income from the $8500 weekly prize pool. But it also puts their skirmishes up on the big screen, so to speak, with veteran casters on hand to broadcast their finals. We caught up with one such caster, Adam “madals” Simmons, who is now D!ngIt’s eSports Co-ordinator, about what the platform means to players, and how to take on a giant like Twitch at its own game.
“Better than Twitch, alternative to Twitch" is a bold claim to make. What makes this true in your eyes? Our technology offers many advantages over other streaming services. Due to our more robust and efficient tech, a viewer can watch a similar quality stream on D!ngIt compared to Twitch at 25 percent or less bitrate. Even at 1080p/60fps resolution someone watching on D!ngIt will only need about 3,000Kbps. Aside from the bandwidth saving, the platform on D!ngIt is efficient so buffering is a fraction of what people experience on other streaming services (especially people who are far away from data centres). We also only have four to six seconds of stream delay, meaning live interaction with chat is nearly instant, as well as offering a virtual keyboard solution so pro players can show just how fast they are!
Do you see the reduced stream delay being a problem given the competitive nature of these games, with regards stream sniping? There are definitely issues with the four-six second stream delay – luckily though they are easily fixed thanks to our stream delay options to broadcasters. Each stream is different, for online eSports events, we can run with five minutes delay to prevent any stream cheating. That is something that is needed without a doubt. For an entertainment stream or play-through style show, stream sniping or similar isn’t an issue and actually the really low delay means the broadcaster can better interact with their audience! Ultimately, we provide choice to each broadcaster. If they need delay for whatever reason, they can activate it. Our stream delay options are open to ALL broadcasters from day one.
How does your monetisation system help pro gamers earn from streaming better than rivals? We provide more opportunity to generate revenue for all our broadcasters and we are able to share more of that revenue than other platforms due to our more efficient technology reducing our overhead costs massively. Some key highlights are subscription buttons for all channels, from day one, and channel subscriptions remove adverts from that channel too! An in-built donation feature – so 90 percent of the revenue goes to the broadcaster, 10 percent is simply for the admin costs of processing it. This works with credit cards as well as PayPal. And advertising revenue share is tiered, meaning broadcasters can start earning a revenue share much earlier with clear goals to get to the next tier. This stops a situation of “who you know” getting you the better deals.
From an eSports perspective, what is D!ngIt trying to do differently or better than rivals? eSports is one of our biggest pushes and when we first set out to look at how to best serve the various communities and pro scenes one thing became clear: consistency is key. There are quite a few sponsors who are happy to get on-board for a big event a few times a year which is all very flashy and nice, but it means there are vast periods of time with not much happening. D!ngIt’s plan is to help facilitate regular content, across all major games so that players, event organisers and viewers all have regular content they can participate in. This isn’t to say that in the future we won’t be running those big, shiny events. For now though we want to make sure we build a solid competitive foundation in our events that can feed into these bigger events first! It is already working well too, we currently have events on at least six days a week, with Saturday being filled by the end of February. Our intention is to scale up in a sustainable way to the point where there are multiple events per day, every day, for all major games and various levels of competitive standard. It’s worth noting that we are directly funding these events too – all our players, casters, admins etc are all paid promptly, so there are no huge delays while a daisy chain of sponsor payments have to trickle down.
How do you see the weekly tournament format helping grow an eSports interest on the site? At the risk of sounding like a broken record: consistency is really key to any type of content creation. While we will ramp up the number of events per week, regular content is our aim. It gives viewers something to watch every night of the week with a variety of different games to suit anyone who wants to watch.
It will also help grow eSports on the site itself thanks to players and content creators knowing they have regular work and competition. Far too often people forget that players especially lack a regular pay cheque and sporadic prize money (especially when paid very late) can cause a lot of stress and ultimately take time away from their practice and competition. At D!ngIt, we hope we can help create a stable foundation to build upon.
We also don’t want to forget the aspiring pro-gamers either! While we aren’t offering much yet, there are definitely plans in the work for semi-pro and casual competition on the site. Again, this is all made viable thanks to our more efficient technology that makes running this sort of event cost effective for us.
Do you have PUG or matchmaking facilities to help single players interested in competing find a team? Not yet – but it is definitely on the mid to long term plans! Are you expecting any bigger name teams to make an appearance in the tournaments? We definitely are! I cannot go into too many details, but we have plans for more higher prize pool events and leagues to attract the top tier of players and teams! The reason we aren’t pushing for that yet is simply because we want the foundations and regular content all running smoothly first.
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