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Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

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131–140 of 219 posts

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#131

For a second I read "GameStop". Headed directly to r/wsb. The fact that they weren't losing their collective mind made me realise that I read it wrong.

Did the same thing. For anyone else reading

Gamespot: video game publication

Gamestop: brick & mortar store used video game reseller of wallstreet bets fame

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#132
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far does PeerTube or something similar go towards solving this problem? You'll still need to seed the initial streams, but if you get a big spike of users, they'll seed the video amongst each other.

From a content and branding perspective, I wouldn't touch PeerTube with a thirty-foot pole. It is fundamentally untenable unless you want people able to take screenshots of your content being featured next to literal-not-figurative Nazi shit. Yes, that's the point of federation, and that the watcher is the one who has those settings to put them next to one another. No, it's not your fault. Yes, it looks awful and it'…

That sounds a bit far fetched. If that was a problem, it would also be a problem with the dozens of Youtube frontends, that are much larger than any Peertube frontend.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#133
post #98
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently. I just left a company that's doing its level best to make this more affordable and achievable for small organizations, and I wish them the absolute best, but this was true when GB was new and it's still true now. Video is just too many bits across too many gatekeepers (like any of the big clouds). It's not that there isn't transit capacity, it's that ever…

How far does PeerTube or something similar go towards solving this problem? You'll still need to seed the initial streams, but if you get a big spike of users, they'll seed the video amongst each other.

Peer to peer non-realtime video distribution has a pretty core fundamental flaw in that users are only seeding when they're watching. Users are likely to stop watching a video if it doesn't interest them, if something else comes up, or more importantly for this conversation, if there's a technical issue that prevents smooth playback.

When a user stops watching for whatever reason, they leave the swarm. If a client has been getting segments from a peer that is close to them, and that user completes watching the video and closes the browser window, that peer goes offline. The player client then needs to find another peer to pull segments from, and hope that the peer can deliver at the same speed. Because most of these player extensions are on top of HLS or DASH, you're not "buffering" in advance very far, so you're sensitive to this bump (this is tunable, and P2P clients generally buffer more segments than those delivered by CDNs exclusively). Whether you can't find a peer with the segments you need, or the peer can't deliver fast enough, or the algo stalls and doesn't fail back to CDN based delivery fast enough, you get a playback stall.

Playback stalls always add frustration, and they're often multiplicative. One stall, you assume there's an internet issue, and it'll be fine. Two stalls, you grow frustrated with the service. Three stalls, you close the window. And now there's another peer dropping out the swarm, causing more interruptions in playback for other users.

IMO, as the tech stands today, P2P video delivery doesn't work super well unless you're setting up a P2P CDN, or have some other mechanism that allows for a peer to more gracefully exit a swarm to avoid stalls and signal to clients to shift before an abrupt exit.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#134
Fandom did this before right before tech markets really, really soured. It was Glam or Mode or something like that. Shortly after the acquisition they ended up doing a significant round of layoffs. Wonder if this will be another bellwether for worse tech market conditions.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#136
post #2

Oh god this is worrying. Fandom has already made Wikia an absolutely unusable, ad ridden nightmare, to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it. I hope they don't apply that same monetisation to GameSpot, GameFAQs, etc. Otherwise those sites will die almost overnight.

Today I am thankful for Kagi having a feature which allows me to remove or downgrade certain sites from search results. It has already saved me countless clicks to fandom and can be easily expanded to include other sites as the fandom cancer grows.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#137
post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

> We had one of the largest podcasts in the world and the hosting bills were killing us. If only there were a way to distribute files freely, in distributed, decentralized fashion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

With webtorrent that is feasible, but requiring a client download would just ensure you weren't the largest anymore and probably infect your users with spyware when they downloaded a bad client.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#138
post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

I don't see too much wrong with Patreon. I support a variety of things I enjoy using it, and the folks who I support get to do what they love while giving me content I love. Maybe we need some Patreon competition? I don't know honestly.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#139

I recognize some old Whiskey Media companies on that list. Have not followed them much after the CBS acquisition and Ryan Davis' passing. Hope they're all doing well over there.

It was when Ryan Davis died that I realized just how intimate the podcasting medium could be. While I also loved the rest of the crew, I couldn't listen to Giant Bomb without him. It was just too sad.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#140

Why TV Guide? Is that relevant in some capacity? They were considered obsolete when I was a kid and only the elderly would still use them. Seems like an interesting purchase, but I quit watching TV a long time ago. Is there something TV Guide does that people still pay attention to?

I still use TV Guide to check what is on for sports, but only a few times a month. I don't normally watch TV and I just have an antenna directly hooked up to my TV. TV Guide is faster than the guide on my TV and I can look beyond the next hour.
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