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It'd be much cheaper than getting a spot on TV, and have less restriction on what can be broadcast, so is this something that we're likely to see any time soon?
Yes, all the You Tube videos, including Top of the Pots, were put together by the TV Team, so going forward, these will discontinue.
If the decision were mine - & it's most certainly not - I would want to know if it was more or less likely to justify its cost & resource by bringing new or additional traffic to the site, or profile-raising to an adequate degree.
It's a bit like "Live Updates" or "streams" of Live Events. Many poker players enjoy reading/watching these, but in my experience, they don't generate any extra traffic, or generate player loyalty. We are poker players, & we just love free stuff.
I watch some of the PokerStars streams, & occasionally watch Jason Somerville's Twitch Stream (because I like him) but I'd never dream of playing on that site. I'm freerolling them.
In a sense you are free-rolling them. but there is a sense in which you are not. The most popular twitch channels are placed first under their catagory. this is a snowball effect where the best viewed channels are placed in the spot that is most likely to attract people looking for a stream to watch. bolstering their numbers does help them hoover up passing trade.
stars is heavily mining the twitch viewership. they have a number of popular poker streamers signed up and thier own twitch channel that streams big final tables to pretty nice numbers. They obviously see gamers as a potentially untapped revenue stream. young peeps, tech savvy interested in competition etc. I read they were at the last twitch convention offering starting bankrolls of a few $100 to any streamer with 10k followers, no matter what game they regularly stream.
it would be hard to build a following for sky, however. most big numbers are generated when people are able to tag their stream with things like "final table hype, 150k up top". sky are more of a bespoke site, with its own charm. to some it will seem small-time and the software to the gaming generation will be, well, if its viewed as quaint then it will be a victory.
that said some clever marketing, give-a-ways etc might spark a loyal following. but a few hundred viewers would constitute a minor hit in the poker channel on twitch. will it direct enough traffic? having a presence on the site can only be a good thing, but making it cost effective is the difficulty. any players / ex presenters with profile that could be pursuaded by a nights play subsidised if they stream regularly?
growing a stream is a real task though. the poker market is getting pretty competetive on twitch and people like polk and tonkaaa are very engaging, play decent stakes and have established channels. there is a barrier to entry there atm.
I had a lost of things I wanted to say on this thread and I'll start with a few...
I always found it a great pleasure to be a (pretty rare) guest on the show in the early days but I found when I started my poker company that we could sort of do a quid pro quo in that I could come on and very briefly promote my site while appearing on Sky...a place that has always shared the idea with our old site of a friendly community for players to interact, to improve, to talk poker gossip and to make friends. As a guest I was always struck by the professionalism of the team...it was sort of obvious that everyone would know what they were doing and not really put a foot wrong as they were making these shows for five hours 20 times a month. What was not obvious was how they could always keep the thing fresh and appealing to new viewers as well as the regulars that loved it. In poker content terms they needed stuff for total beginners as well as for more experienced players. I thought a great job was always done in maintaining the balance.
Those five hour sessions were pretty exhausting but the team helped to make them fun and they flew by.
Tonight's line-up is Richard Orford as Presenter, with Anna Fowler as the recreational player taking on pro player Ryan Spittles, & with - as DoyleBrun would attest - waffle (interesting waffle) supplied by Yours Truly.
I would doubt that anything special is planned as such, as we have to keep it professional for Sky Sports.
It'll be an upbeat show though, I'm sure of that.
When I signed up with Sky it was slightly weird to go on the show and be more of a regular than a guest and I always felt a little bit rude to be bursting into something that worked so well for so many years without me. The whole team, both those who appear in front of the camera and those who work away out of the limelight, were hugely welcoming and always professional but I was actually quite a bit more nervous when I started appearing as the Ambassador rather than as someone who could just sit there and chip in when I fancied it.
I'm not sure how long it was after I started wearing a Sky Poker patch before the announcement was made that the show was moving to a once a week Sky Sports slot but the decision certainly made a lot of sense to me. There was no real choice as SB&G didn't have a licence to run a shopping channel as the licence was owned by BskyB but even if they could have carried on they would have been weighing whether to continue making a large band of largely existing customers who watch occasionally very happy as those people really loved the show and many had been with it from the start, but not many of them watched it on any given night, against getting 50x more people to watch it many of whom had no idea why they were watching it, what was going on or whether they would ever watch it again. I definitely think taking the later option would have ben the right choice if there had been a choice but that presented a whole new challenge to those that worked on the show to make something that might appeal to a much newer and more casual viewer who may have only just arrived and who may not stay long.
I think they did a brilliant job at covering all bases and making something fresh, different and interesting that engaged a pretty huge number of people every week.