Planet Keef Livestream, February 4th

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I did my first Planet Keef livestream a few days ago. I had done one a few months ago on Keef Cooks and thoroughly enjoyed it. I wanted to do one for Planet Keef for the simple reason that livestreams last much longer than edited videos - about 90 minutes is what I aim for - and so it's a good way to pile up a lot of watch time. And if you're wondering why I'm worried about watch time, well I'm not, but YouTube loves it. In fact YouTube loves it so much that under the new rules for monetising videos on new channels, you need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in the previous 12 months. It's a significant barrier to entry.

To give you some perspective, right now Planet Keef has 601 subscribers and has had 20,041 minutes of watch time in the last 365 days. So that's 334 hours. (I'm not really being fair here, the channel was wandering around in the wilderness until about a month ago and in the last 28 days it's had 12,000 minutes of watch time.)

Enough about numbers. The livestream itself was slightly disastrous. I'd decided to do it from my garage, which is the principal location for Planetary activity. Now, in order to do a fairly professional livestream, you need to have your proper camera plugged into a computer, and some encoding software to convert the signal into something that can be sent to YouTube for them to spit out all over the Interwebz. I've never managed to get my camera talking to my computer, so that wasn't an option.

I had to use the somewhat less professional option of livestreaming from my phone. And I had intended to use my old MacBook to monitor the stream and show me the chat messages. A sensible person would have tried this combo before starting, but I didn't - after all, it had worked previously when I did it from the kitchen. So the first problem was that the wifi signal in the garage can be flaky - I couldn't get a decent connection with my phone, and ended up having to use 4G mobile data - my entire monthly allowance of 3 Gigabytes. The MacBook had a much better wifi signal and I'd been using it all morning to listen to some nostalgic old records on YouTube.

I had 2 false starts come 2pm. My phone was saying I was connected, but I couldn't see it on my Planet Keef page, and neither could anyone else. I found out after the event that those sessions were sitting on my KeefCooks page - I'd been logged in to the wrong account on my phone.

Finally, I got started about 20 minutes late. I had the phone taped to a boom mic stand and I was sitting comfortably in a nicely composed workshop scene. But I was too far away from the phone's screen to be able to read the comments. Not to worry, that's why I have my MacBook close at hand. But that fell apart when I tried to log in to YouTube - Google wasn't having it. Firstly, it didn't recognise the device, and secondly it blocked it because the browser I was using was out of date and 'a security risk'. I should point out that I stopped using it 5 years ago, and I can't upgrade the operating system (because I missed a key step on the upgrade path), and therefore can't download any new software.

So I ended up, stressed, frazzled and annoyed with myself, having to hold my phone in my hand. This meant we had a lot of nostril shots, frequent views of the top of my head and the garage roof, and quite a lot of pink screening as I obscured the lens with my hand when I was scrolling the chat.

Apart from all that, it was great fun and definitely something I'll do again. Once I've got the technology sorted out.

Here's the archived video:

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