We've been working hard on this project for almost a year now. I hope you all enjoy it! We need your feedback :)

Pretty excited to have this launched!

Here's a gander at the very first mockup:
http://www.gamescast.tv/matt/early/mockup-1.jpg
(from October 2009)

We've gone a long way, folks. Haha.

Looks good.

Nice interface, would be great if this became my single destination for watching coverage. Will definitely keep visiting.

that is certainly our hope! Help us reach that goal with feedback and whatnot ;)

You guys should connect with GamersPortal in some way. Imagine the communities of gamers and gamers involved in the spectating portion all networked together?

If you need an invite into the site just let me know. It's currently in alpha testing.

I have no idea what Gamesportal is all about. Care to let me in?

Nice list of games you cover, just get LoL in there and you'll be set.

It's already there.

really nice interface + games. Bookmarked

looks promising

Not putting down your web site, I just think it's not necessary to unify esports coverage.

The vast majority of people in each scene are exclusive or only participate in two or maybe three titles. A WC3 fan is not likely to want to see TF2 matches, for instance. A Quake Live player is not likely to want to see CS matches. A SC2 player is not likely to want to see Tekken.

It will be useful for some people I suppose, but I personally don't think it's a good investment of your time and money.

i want to see some sc2, ql and ssf4 matches

Different people, different tastes.

Some will go there just to watch QL and others to watch several games.

Th best part is that you dont need to go to a dozen of websites to do it!

Its like tivo ;D (does gamescast record all the streams? would be awesome to have a vod vault)

You chose what you want to watch.


Go!!!

You chose what you want to watch.

You already can.

While they certainly can exist in separate instances, they will gain a lot of strength thru unity of infrastructure, experience, and creative collaboration. This is only a plus for us.

:) awesome

Super Street Fighter IV

saved my day

This will be awesome, if casters can actually do things according to a schedule. I'm not critizising, but usually, stuff just seems to happen without it being scheduled or planned :D

great for my daily fix of esports!

I approve.

[AG-whally]

Shouln't the games list be longer though? I know that for instance Tastyspleen also cover at least Quake 2, Quake 3, Warsow and Doom. And LVL^ covers BLC.

BLC should be there yea, as they already have some streams listed in the schedule.

There are other games that will be covered, I decided to keep the list somewhat short to emphasize certain games. But yes, we actually already support BLC, and like you said, Quake 2 and Warsow as well

And Doom, never forget Doom. }:D

If this site is able to cover all of the major streams for all the major events, I would definitely use it regularly instead of trying to juggle 5 different sites. great idea imo

Looks good.

The schedule page is abit laggy when I scroll left/right and my laptop isn't exactly old.

I would suggest some sort of < > arrows to scroll the next 5 days. It would be a damn sight smoother.

Good luck!

why register? what do i get with my own account? i couldn't find any info about that. will i be able to filter my fav. shows? will you notify me few hours before my fav. show starts?

"Once registered, users can specify which broadcasters or games they would like see on their custom home page."
-From the linked press release

Great idea!

This is quite good.

looks usefull, registered

btw, i added ql and sc2 to my favorites, now what i get is "Show Favorites take priority over Game Favorites." but what i want is "Show only Favorites". there shopuld be an option for that

also i cant scroll into the past, that kinda sucks cause you sometimes wanna check what you might have missed over the weekend or so

- in the games section, quake 2 has the quake live logo
- clicking on feedback brings you to the forum, something like this should always open in a new window/tab imho

€: and made a logo for the post, looked a bit stupid without any

"btw, i added ql and sc2 to my favorites, now what i get is "Show Favorites take priority over Game Favorites." but what i want is "Show only Favorites". there shopuld be an option for that"


I dont know if that would be good, the plan is also to enlarge the viewerbase for every other game (e.g. we would love quakelive to be seen by more people) so I would let it be like that so that you can't uncheck any game...

well if someone would just visit the site, he would still see everything but people who register probably know what they want anyway so im not sure if its worth it to cut the usability for the regular user

while you cannot scroll into the past on the schedule, you can click "History" under "Live Updates" to see recent activity.

ehh..i'm sticking with lvl^ ...they always do their job.=)

lvl^ is part of this as well

this is not a streaming service and if you enjoy lvl, this might help even help you to not miss a show

excellent idea.

Site is too slow.

i dont get why u put hon instead of dota. hon is shit and there are alot more viewers in dota

sry, just noticed u cover lol too. nevermind what i said before!!!!!!!!!!!

im sticking with lvl^

sigh

this is not a fucking streaming service, its a custom streaming listing for e-sport content

kewl ... this is nice! ... simple and easy to navigate, good project.

and yes... we needed a list of everything in ONE place! ... tnx

... will there be schedules and brackets available aswell? ... any special plans for mayor events and how will gamecast handle it? (idk background changes etc?)

We are working on a very nice partnership which will link events on Games Cast TV to articles and coverage. This is in the works.

nice... very nice. ... then everything WILL be at one place. No more frantic searching at the last min ^^

great idea, I hope it will work out well. :)

Nice idea!
One improvement that you can do, is maybe to provide a link to the website of tourney/show that is currently being casted, so that if I go and watch some random coverage, I can get an idea of what's going on.

The icons below the broadcasters logo will take you to their profile/webpage/twitter...

It's described in this picture together with all the other features.

Nice idea. I reailze the site's still in beta. However, #2 posted an old mock-up http://www.gamescast.tv/matt/early/mockup-1.jpg which looks WAY more attractive through its simplicity in design and not a thousand colors being spammed etc. Think this is what sites like Youtube and Facebook are doing as well afaik.

-Way too much grey and black backgrounds being spammed everywhere for those menu headers and footers etc. Maybe just cut down on all those?

-Have the partners and games images to be highlighted with colors

-Site unnecessarily scrolls to a second page

-Maybe add a tab or section or something to view broadcasts or streams or games based on their popularity (by views or clicks or rates or whatever) for the avid watcher who may just want to tune into some random/popular stream?

Afaik, both the broadcaster list and the games list is sorted by last active stream.

I disagree. I'd rather have several shades of grey (and I think it's done tastefully anyhow) than the very bland black and white mockup in your post with barely anything on it. You say a thousand colors spammed but then complain about too much grey.

My bad. Wrong choice of words.

great idea, i have some tiny suggestions:

- needs individual timezones ( choose ur timezone in profile)
- needs a chat interface, preferably with multichannel support (like games cast mainchannel + one for the show ur watchin atm )
- make shedule show the past 3(?!?!) days and link shows that aired with the VOD if existing

- keep up the good work, enjoying it !!! THANKS

The site automatically detects your timezone and should display times local to you. If you've registered, you can change the time format for some things like Live Updates so that they're twitter-like, (i.e. "2 hours ago") in your Profile. More options will be added soon, by the way.

Chat is also already included. If a broadcaster has entered their IRC info, a button will appear just below the stream of the featured show on the left. On the right below the video stream, we provide access to GamesCast's chat. Click either of those "Join Chat" buttons and let me know if that meets your needs.

As for VODs: Support for VOD libraries and possibly demos are intended for a later version of the site. For now, we wanted to focus entirely on live and upcoming events. VODs will be a huge undertaking since I have some grandiose hopes to be able to develop a full-fledged cross-site search system and all kinds of tools to get at exactly what you're seeking. All in due time, I hope. :)

VoDs are needed to maek this work, just to make sure that's clear and not something you want to do but never do :-)

looks good, but the important thing is whether it supports militia?

That old mockup is shit. White simply isn't a color I'd associate with watching competitive matches. In fact, I think the darker the better and the grey they got now ins't really much of anything. Its just kinda bleh. It doesn't present a strong image.

Go look at lvl^, or better yet, go look at espn3.com and see what a multi million dollar company thinks a sports streaming website should look like. Its almost black. Dark color adds a certain level of gravitas. White is for looking at kittens and teeheeing with your lady friend. Dark is for dudes pitting their skills over (hopefully) large sums of money.

"Dark color adds a certain level of gravitas."

Or it just helps you see the video better lol

Nice. I hope gaming will come soon on TV too. In Asia gaming on tv is very popular now days.

Great, but this is just a evolution unless it is a real TV station. Only revolution as a 24h/day TV e-sport channel with a commercial aspect that promotes new games and hardware can bring us to good times. We need masses! GJ anyway.

I'm currently working on a website of my own which will have a lot of stuff related to gaming, all in one place. I had the following things in mind and think that you'll be able to implement them in a better way with the experienced panel that you have:

1. Have a no-bullshit demo section with search boxes just like HLTV.org's demo section. Give the user the option to search a demo by map name or event name. When it comes to these things, redundancy is always good!

2. As much as I love what lvl^ did @ Dreamhack, id #74 for a VOD's name is definitely not gonna help anyone figure out if Cypher played Strenx in that video. Classification of VODs is a must, just like Demo's by event and map name.

3. Have the menu bar contain only the following:

CoD4 | QuakeLive | Starcraft 2 | SSF 4 | CS 1.6 | LoL | HoN | QW

DO NOT include Home | About Us on the top menu. It's very 2002'ish and About us | Contact us should be separate pages in a side bar.

4. A nicely detailed Schedule listing on the side bar would be nice. On cadred.org for instance a match that has gone live starts blinking as 'LIVE'. You click on that match and it shows you a page with the HLTV link to that match. Relate this to point #3 and you'll see what I have in mind. As soon as a match goes live, the side bar makes that text blink or puts an 'On Now' tag like ESR. As soon as someone clicks on it, the SC2 stream opens up in the center frame. If I want to watch 2 overlapping games at the same time, I open the other game in a new window/tab. My top menu serves the same purpose, unless I open it in a new window as well.

5. I'm against the concept of adding Favorites link. The top menu bar should get you where you wanna be in a single click. However, if you want to add a Favorites section to Demos/VOD's database, that'd be slick!

6. You guys kick ass! Keep on doing what you do. Respect :)

Sounds interesting. Add my on skype (fishstix1) if you want to chat more about ideas / partnership

We don't even have a QL server in India :)

Anyway, those were suggestions for you guys to add to your site. Mine's just a wordpress blog coupled with a forum. I do hope you guys pull this off and take casting to a new level.

Just in case you wanna know :)

www.gamenation.in

DotA>hon>lol ffs, much more popular and more money involved...

They're not sorted according to popularity...it's just a template for the top menu ffs!

Looks really nice, good work.

Would be great to have a iGoogle gadget for schedules.

First, thank you all for the feedback. It has been very helpful. I'm the lead developer on the project so if you encounter bugs, let me know and I'll do my best to fix them.

Since QL is near and dear to my heart and I've been scouring ESR for over a decade, I wanted to mention a few things we have planned between this open beta and a full "version 1.0" release as a special nod to the ESR community.

First, we have several games we'll be adding and a few we'll be removing. Basically, if it has some sort of competitive gaming video stream attached to it, we're interested in it. At the top of our list for additions are:

Bloodline Champions
Dawn of War 2
League of Legends

Second, we plan to offer at least two site layouts on release... one similar to what we have now and one optimized for widescreen viewing. We're using the open beta to gather data on what screen resolutions our viewers are using when they visit so we can target the largest group. Once we have that in place, we'll probably offer even more widescreen variations for a more customized experience, but we want to hit that common denominator first.

We'll probably leave brackets and such to the tournament sites that host leagues, but we have already developed a way to integrate links to external content that are relevant to whatever is being watched (though it's not on display during this beta).

We've even partnered with another site (soon to launch) that will offer tons of coverage of major events and have some collaboration with them for feeding additional, up-to-date content between our two sites.

Hope that helps answer some questions and provides a sense of direction for the short-term.

Time Zone detection must be off a bit. I'm UTC -6 and it's defaulting to UTC -5.

Hmm... I'm using Javascript's getTimezoneOffset() function to calculate the local time. It should take into account things like Daylight Savings and all that crap. Toss up a post on GCTV's Feedback -> Bug section:

http://www.gamescast.tv/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32

and I'll see if I can get it worked out.

Isn't this was own3d.tv already does? Why make two?

own3d is a streaming service
this is a schedule
lvl is a casting group

cant be so hard

ye, think of it as a several streams with schedules on one place. You wanna watch some e-sports coverage ? Just go there to schedule section and see when is something on.

Just registered. Can't wait to test it

Great idea and site. Looks really promising, I was just yesterday watching Lo3 and some Dawn of War, it's very nice.

+1 for the idea ;)

Don't know.. need to hit the casuals harder for this to grow. Try to get gamespot involved somehow and WoW matches / other huge MMORPGs.

Maybe host Electric Playground episodes (the tv show) on the site too?

no, don't :)

I disagree, that's like letting 12 year olds into a bar.

GameCast sounds better than GamesCast

nemescel

You have to make it so the schedule show the time of the casts in specific users timezone.

It does.

When I see those COD streams in full details I wonder why lvlup don't broadcast QL in picmip 0. It would be way nicer to watch.
Is it their bandwidth ? Is it the game itself that need more bandwidth because it's too fast ?

Fuck picmip 0..... :D

Most of the early QL streams used full graphics, shit was painful on the eyes to watch. You gotta remember CoD is about camping behind a wrecked car for 3 hours with a sniper rifle. Quake isn't.

Yes but most of the early QL streams used Ustream with low bandwidth and it s not comparable to own3d quality on the last event for example. It matters most for the ppl that dont play quake and watch the stream...

If you pump out a lq stream from the same machine it'll look so shitty people will rather watch the hq at 12fps than fell their eyes melt.

And own3d craps out pretty often, I randomly had to fall back on the lq stream during dh even though I could watch both hq streams without any problems when I tried to.

I'm a regular QL player, I watch streams very often and I'd like picmip 0 streams. I don't get it, sorry.
Playing with picmip, ok. But not streaming in full details when you have enough bandwitch to keep the framerate/encoding high... Where's the problem ? Does picmip 0 really prevents you to follow/enjoy a game ? -_-

I personally prefer Quake Live with Picmip 10 on as I find it looks better then. But also, since it's not about graphics it's just so much better to watch Quake without the textures as it makes it clearer.

<3

This. This alienates stupid noobs, someone told the streaming guys to use picmip 0.

GL with this project.

Yes i know, most useless comment ever.

I don't care.

if i reply then......oops

very low quality of streams

It may seem lazy to some, but perhaps you could implement some sort of reminder or notification service, either through site email or google calendar or such.

I say this because I sometimes neglect to check any esports websites, and then realize i missed a match or two i would have definitely checked out if i had had the presence of mind to set a reminder!

So, this site is just listing current & upcoming games casting?

Signing up just allows it to display events in your local time?

It should already be showing your local time. Signing up allows you to set up favorites for games and broadcasters.

"Once registered, users can specify which broadcasters or games they would like see on their custom home page."

For those that are wondering, all times "should" be local to you already. If they're not, please post in our feedback forums so we can work out the bugs.

We do offer RSS feeds of our schedule at the moment and they can even be filtered by game or broadcaster, but I've also been pondering some ideas for some sort of reminder utility. One of 2GD's suggestions was that I should make a FireFox browser plugin, which, when I have some free time, seems like a neat idea to explore.

the day u add pay2watch gonna be one of ur last days

Have you fallen and landed on your head or something?

We've made some updates, including some visual feedback about what timezone the site has detected for you. Please post if you're getting incorrect GMT +/- values. I've tested w/ a handful of people, but most of us were North American. I'd love some feedback from EU, Asia, Africa, South America etc.

You're still lacking the option to switch to a 24-hour clock (military time), heck that should be the default... It's the international standard for time, only Americans understand/use that am/pm stuff ;)

On the live page could you maybe move the now playing thing down below the stream (so it would look sort of like an iPlayer page) to allow for widescreen stream window?

All Q2 related stuff is using QL symbols btw

not to be confused with gamecast-tv.com O.o

Testing something... GCTV will be back very soon! - Greased

/o\