MS08: Farm streaming and chicken wisdom
Alternatively: "The importance of quality, content pipelines, and love."
I was going to write this week’s newsletter about something very esportsy, but then I got distracted by chickens.
My friend Julia shared this lovely stream called OurChickenLife yesterday, and I spent a good chunk of time enjoying the spectacle.
Maybe it’s the recent explosion of “cottagecore” content or just the general insanity from lockdown, but I’m enjoying following more farming/homesteading stuff and I see the appeal to that kind of life. There’s no shortage of novelty “24/7” streams on Twitch, but I found this one extremely high quality: their sound and video are amazing and their interactivity should be used as a model for other channels like it.
Subscribers and Bit donors can use commands to feed the chickens; there’s numerous feeders around the pen, and what I think is a CO2 cannon that “blasts” treats over the whole yard. I imagine that since the farmer knows the levels of feed, he can avoid over-feeding (I mean, can you do that with a chicken?), and essentially it automates part of his job.
There’s also a really elaborate camera system that isn’t just one static shot. Thankfully they have a hardware section of their site that lists twelve of them, and some have chat-controllable pan/tilt/zoom to a really precise degree. Users are able to control both what cameras show up, and also influence their pan/tilt/zoom with text commands.
After the novelty of the channel wore off yesterday, I closed the tab and went about my day. Today, I did something I very rarely do: I came back. After wondering why I came back, I figured out what I was going to write about this week for the newsletter.
OCL have a value proposition for you: simplicity, and the concept of “wholesomeness.” While I think that latter attribute is already starting to become synthesized and overdone, I feel that this is a genuine, authentic product. It’s extremely well-produced, and you can tell there’s a lot of care for the presentation of these animals.
Going back to my initial newsletter, the concept of “providing value” works really well here. The average viewer sees something they normally wouldn’t, and has a level of control over how they interact with their environment. They’re also given tools to learn more about the world of OCL, and invest themselves appropriately.
The OCL website is actually really well-done, and provides a lot of tagged posts with each individual animal’s photos, descriptions, and updates about what’s going on with them. This has allowed people to find specific animals that they find cute or interesting, and “follow” them in their day-to-day on stream. They even make fanart.
Ironically, this kind of pipeline is also done with humans of various industries and fandoms, but it’s probably better executed here, since the animals don’t exactly have a concept of privacy — they’re always performing, and they don’t care.
It also does something that other sites fail to do with their blogs: it keeps them updated! Furnishing blog posts with Twitch Clips feed back into the “you gotta be here to see it live” motivation, and good photos give people a chance to see the animals up close.
It’s very, very rare to see a good system of “stream, video, blog, social” for a stream anymore, and I really applaud OCL’s content people for putting together something that feels natural. The photos are good, the audio is good, the video is good, and community they’ve built for themselves is applaudable.
The chat uses slow mode extremely well; since you have a lot of “competing” commands for feeding, camera movement, etc, it works very well for the stream’s current size. However, if it grew to say, 500 viewers (currently, it’s around 120-150), I could see it needing a bit more than automated moderation.
At this size, each viewer has a moderate amount of control over what they find interesting. They can direct the cameras, feed the chickens, or comment over what they see. If they get bored, they can check out the farm’s other streams for their ducks, roosters, or sheep.
I can’t imagine this kind of stream “blowing up”, and I almost don’t want it to. The feeling of solitude and calm nature of the stream is one of its biggest advantages, and while I can imagine that camera control wars have happened, I wouldn’t want to see trolls get ahold of this.
The thing that keeps boggling my mind is “this is really well done.” The quality of the cameras, the rigging of them to different areas of the animals, the control they give to the viewers, the responsiveness of things like the camera/feeder commands and the moderation are all just really solid, and that only comes through learning what feels right, and how best to set it up to achieve your goals.
I’ve seen too many other automated streams have no level of interactivity, or the quality of camera/audio/etc are bad, blown out by the wind, or just… there? There’s no thought put into how people are actually supposed to derive value from the stream besides “I have put a camera here, please give me money, now.”
That revenue generation is probably the last thing on OCL’s mind, but I think it’s important to mention. These kind of streams suffer from not being able to answer the question “Why should I go beyond just being a viewer?” and “Why should I advocate for you?”
A daily quota of feeding actions means that people will want to check in to spend them. It gives them a reason to come back, see what the animals are up to that day, and that habit forms into attachment. People feel they’re helping the farmer, and directly influencing their loved animals’ lives.
On the streamer side of things, that building of both your audience and income also help your motivation, as well. It gives you the room and reason to improve, because there’s always a way to better serve your customers.
It’s clear that this setup wasn’t built in a day, and the team at OCL has incrementally improved how they present their product as a labor of love. Farmer Spence has a genuine “Bob Ross” feel about him in the way he approaches his work, and his son’s photo and video work adds a necessary modern touch to the media: in an ongoing project like this, you need both that care and quality that both of them are bringing. I also have to shout out their bloggers’ writing, as posts have a great tone, and get why people are coming to the site: great media, and learning more about the things they see.
Hat’s off to you, OurChickenLife. You had me spend my American Thanksgiving watching chickens eat a “pie” of raw pumpkin and worms.
Housekeeping and updates
I’ve been a bit low-key this week since I’m working on taking a bit of a break from technology. I know last week I outlined a bit of a strategy for a technology fast, but I think I’m modifying the plan to be a bit less hardline and a bit more flexible; I have a tendency to be very “all or nothing,” and it’s been nice to catch myself in a habit and make an effort to tangibly change.
I finished Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and despite the misgivings I had in the post I wrote about its RPG system last week, I really liked how it ended. It seems like across the board people were blown away by the voice acting by the main character in the game’s final chapter, and I definitely was, too.
Sometimes simple storytelling is best, and having someone be able to sell the emotion of the plot means that it didn’t fall into the trap that other games in the franchise did: it didn’t need huge plot twists or “wait what!?” moments in its final hours.
The Yakuza franchise is really close to my heart, and I recommend wishlisting the games on PC if you’re looking for really fun beat-em-up/action games. They should be on sale during the Steam Autumn sale.
A reminder that if you want to support my work more directly, you can become my patron on Patreon, or share this newsletter to your friends.
Have a good weekend, and a safe start to winter!