Hi, I’m Mike and I outlined all the Education Row panels from the TwitchCon 2016 panel recap.

After watching all the panels in Education Row, the “How to Home Studio” segments from both day two and day three are really really good and if you want something specific to watch, it’s that. From a technical standpoint, that will be the most beneficial if you’re a beginner to intermediate broadcaster. Even just the gear he talks about is really good.

The rest are all for specific stuff that is at various points of usability and accessibility. In terms of software we can’t use because it’s in beta, Strexm and Infiniscene are the things I’m personally looking forward to but especially with Infiniscene, it’s no surprise that I was looking forward to see what they had leading up to TwitchCon. It’s hard to be excited about the other stuff though because we’re in a weird cloud-based bubble that’s gotta pop soon. So many of these services are cloud-based in some way and many are in beta so as a person new to some of these apps and tools, seeing all the products was probably really confusing. Then the add-on services also seem so niche-y and weird. I really just want some better alerts or alert systems maybe. I’m not sure how I feel about all these watching stream games, chat games, gamifying watching streams, bounties for streams, it’s a weird time.

In terms of panel quality, this was probably a harder space than others. So many of these panels were just reading off slides and it’s kind of boring. Kind of really boring. I got through them because I’m a geek but if someone tuned in randomly to some of these, you might walk away thinking, “This stuff is so bad. What is this?” and that’s no good because sometimes there’s some good information in these segments. I don’t know how you improve the quality of something like this but if there was a way to make these more interesting, that would be great.

I mentioned at the beginning that a lot of these just feel like marketing opportunities for everyone at the Education Zone thing but I got over that pretty quickly. All the stuff at Education Row is or will be something cool for streamers so giving them the opportunity to show off some stuff isn’t bad. I do wish that anything that got shown was further along. “Apple-like” is what I used to say about presentations where at the end you go “and this is available NOW!”. Apple doesn’t do that so much anymore but I wish they did. Being excited for something that isn’t released is so lame so if you talk about something here, I would want to jump on it. Like that Liquid Sky panel, I wanted to just be like “THERE’S NO WAY THAT WORKS I WANT TO TRY” but I can’t because it’s in closed beta. AND, Cynical Michael kind of doesn’t even believe half of these products will be around this time next year which isn’t a very kind thing probably but there was a lot of weird stuff there.

The Twitch Education zone in general was a great place to be around. If you’re a smaller streamer, this is where you should have been talking and handing around business cards. The entire expo hall was pretty accommodating for streamers of various sizes but the education zone is where your life becomes easier, this year especially. Do you not like your software? Talk to the Infiniscene guys about what they had to offer. Do you want an overlay but not know where to start? Talk to the Strexm guys about their product and ask them when you can start using it. Do you want to want to offer different rewards to your viewers? Revlo and Gamewisp were both there and are both great options.

If you’re a passionate content creator and you haven’t realized this already, people are very willing to work with you as long as you’re clearly working hard and putting time in. If you’re a small streamer and you don’t get a lot of viewers but you really like doing what you do and you’re having a good time, any one of the people at the Education Zone would be more than willing to talk to you and try and help you out in some way. Even if they presented poorly or something, this is the time to look through the stuff there at least and if something is moderately interesting, just go for it. Send them an email, tweet at them, try their product, do some stuff. Just get yourself out there.