LRR on Roku

[baggins_of_41]

So I was browsing around on my Roku box after the latest software upgrade and what do I see? A rather familiar blue logo is the second item on the comedy section of the Blip.tv channel.

I've got to say, that is *awesome*! For some reason, though, it seems to be a little behind. The most recent video on there is the cH epilogue. Still- I hope this gets LRR a little more mainstream exposure and some new viewers.

[goat]

Except... they've stopped using Blip.tv, having switched to youtube. And soon they'll be making the switch to the escapist's video player.

... but yay for exposure!

[baggins_of_41]

The epilogue is being hosted on YouTube but it still shows up on the Blip.tv channel. But, yeah- the Escapist exclusive thing sucks royally. They finally manage to get into the living rooms and TV sets of hundreds of thousands of people and then announce the very next day that they're going to be exclusive to a tiny website that a few gaming nerds frequent?

I mean, it's great that they're going to be getting paid by the Escapist, but surely there could have been a way to handle it that wasn't such a *backwards* move.

Sorry. Guess I'm just a little bitter. I got all excited about seeing LRR on Roku and then saw the announcement about the Escapist an hour later. Kinda ruined my day.

[sdhonda]

Videos prior to Jan 2010 will be on LRR, Blip and Youtube.

[Master Gunner]

The epilogue is being hosted on YouTube but it still shows up on the Blip.tv channel. But, yeah- the Escapist exclusive thing sucks royally. They finally manage to get into the living rooms and TV sets of hundreds of thousands of people and then announce the very next day that they're going to be exclusive to a tiny website that a few gaming nerds frequent?

I mean, it's great that they're going to be getting paid by the Escapist, but surely there could have been a way to handle it that wasn't such a *backwards* move.

Sorry. Guess I'm just a little bitter. I got all excited about seeing LRR on Roku and then saw the announcement about the Escapist an hour later. Kinda ruined my day.

Uhh....perhaps relative to the population of the planet, The Escapist is only frequented by a few gaming nerds. However, it certainly gets several times the traffic of this site, enough to actually pay the crew for their efforts instead of just barely supporting the server costs. I fail to see how being exposed to many, many, more people and getting paid for it is a step backwards.

[baggins_of_41]

I absolutely agree with you on the "getting paid for it" bit. *That* is great. I'm glad the guys have been able to swing that. Overall, I've got no doubt that this is an *immensely* positive move for the LRR team to make and I'm happy that they're doing it.

The only part of it that I meant was backwards was the exposure angle. I would be *very* surprised to learn that the Escapist has even 5% of the audience that Roku has. It's like moving from being featured on a weekly segment on CNN to an exclusive deal with a broadcast station that covers Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and southern Quebec. To justify a move like that, the broadcast station better be paying a hell of a lot better than CNN was.

In this case, the LRR team is almost certainly increasing their profits enough to justify the move, but since they've been talking for months about their desire to increase their viewership numbers, I think this move *is* backwards- but in viewership *only*, not in any overall negative sense.

[Master Gunner]

Well I've never heard of Roku before, and any appearance of LRR content on it would be purely accidental from it spitting out files hosted on blip.tv. I've certainly never heard of anyone coming here through roku, but there are dozens that have come from the Escapist. So its more like going from the CNN news ticker that just grabs AP headlines, to a half-hour segment on the CBC. Smaller audience in absolute terms, but infinitely more likely to be noticed by said audience. And, you know, actually get payed something instead of the NOTHING they were payed before.

[baggins_of_41]

I'm surprised you've never heard of Roku. Does Netflix not operate in Canada? I knew they didn't initially, but I thought they would have rectified that by now. The Roku devices are absolutely *huge* in the United States. Initially they were only for streaming Netflix movies, but then they signed deals with Amazon and Major League Baseball. They were introduced a couple of years ago and have been growing exponentially. The last estimates I could find were 300,000 units, but that was way back in March. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they're in close to a million homes now.

[Vigafre]

I've never heard of Roku either.

[Master Gunner]

How many of those people with Roku boxes regularly check the blip.tv channel though? Much less the comedy section of that channel? And of those, how many would be seeing the LRR videos there on anything resembling a regular basis? And LRR only uses blip.tv to hose the quicktime versions of the videos anyways, which wasn't going to last forever anyways. Best case benefit of sticking with their current system, which accidentally makes them available on Roku boxes: their videos are viewed by an extra couple thousand people, of whom, less than 10% will likely find their way to the site, and less than 10% of those would click on the ads to make LRR money.

Now, the benefits of exclusively licensing to the Escapist (which may at some point in the future also be available on Roku boxes, as they want to reach more people too): They now get payed (and even a guaranteed $100 per video is far, far, better than a potential $10 or less), and the Escapist has an Alexa rating of 4112 right now, verses LRR's 76,820 (by comparison, Penny arcade has a rating of 3561), so their videos are essentially guaranteed to make it out to a much larger audience.

So even if everyone with a Roku box watched the LRR videos on it, they obviously aren't coming to the site, and thus aren't increasing LRR's income. By going to the Escapist though, their videos are reaching a larger audience in a way that can be tracked, and they are getting payed for it. So its not a step backwards in viewership or payment, but rather a vast step forwards in both.

[Gray24]

I've only heard of Roku in the context of a BOL podcast...what is it? Like a set-top box. In terms of their (LRR) audience Escapist would be a better outlet then Roku by several orders of magnitude.

[baggins_of_41]

Look, Master Gunner- I've already stated multiple times that I agree the financial aspect of the Escapist deal is a win. I'm not arguing the point so you don't need to keep harping on it.

As for the 'accidental' nature of LRR on the Roku- you may be right. It kind of looks like the people at Blip are hand picking the shows that go on their channel, but that's neither here nor there.

As someone who actually *owns* a Roku and can see for himself how things are laid out on it, LRR accidentally got placed in a fairly prominent position on the box. They *are* going to be noticed because of this. What will the total impact be? I don't know- I make no claims of knowing. I just have a gut feeling that the exposure via the Escapist will be smaller than the exposure through the Roku. Would 100 Escapist viewers be more valuable than 1000 Roku viewers? Quite possibly- as I said I'm not debating the financial aspect of this.

My one and *only* point this *entire* time has been that I think they will get fewer individual new viewers from the Escapist than from Roku. The only reason I even brought that up is because *number* of viewers is something the team has been talking about on the podcast and blog ever since they started Hustle.

One last point and then I'm done for good with this thread (since we both agree on the most important point anyway):

I personally don't put much stock in Alexa since they get all their numbers from machines infected with a trojan, but if you want to use them as a metric, take a look at Netflix- the company that has been pushing the Roku box. Their rank is 182. Now, granted not every person who uses Netflix owns a Roku box, but a significant percentage do. Now look at the numbers for Roku.com itself. They are ranked at 5,828 in the US (which is apparently the only country where they are currently available). That compares extremely well to the Escapist when you consider that there is never any *content* on the Roku site and the only reason for most people to ever go there is for the purposes of buying a Roku box and then never visit the site again.

EDIT: One last thing I forgot to mention- you've never heard of anyone coming here from Roku, because Roku only just started rolling out the software update that makes it possible to find LRR on it since the 23rd of this month. Most Roku owners don't even have the software yet.