At the end of September, I traveled to San Deigo, California to TwichCon 2019 for a dual purpose visit. My son, the professional gamer, was not old enough to book his own hotel room so he needed his old man. What I discovered at the conference was unbelievable. There were approximately 50,000 people in attendance (that in it self was shocking), and many seminars and vendors to learn from. I was amazed at the possibilities I discovered for IONTB to utilize Twitch for its live stream video.
Hence, I began my Twitch journey. I invested in some equipment that is used by many of the mainstream media allowing them for transmit high definition video from remote locations. This much smaller gadget, in large, replaces the huge antenna masts that crews would deploy from the top of their vans. It has been exciting to experiment with this technology over the past few weeks.
Many of you may not have heard of Twitch. It is a fully owned subsidiarity of Amazon and the largest live streaming service for video games in the United States. Twitch has started to branch out to other streaming categories unrelated to video games. Twitch boasts that they have well over 15 million daily active users
IONTB has now been accepted into the Twitch Affiliate Program. Let me try to briefly explain what this means regarding the possibilities for IONTB. This program has the potential to substantially fund IONTB with no cost to subscribers who currently have Amazon Prime. Membership in Twitch Prime is free to all Amazon Prime members. In addition, all Amazon Prime accounts are able to give one free subscription (prime subscription) to their favorite streamer (Hint: IONTB).
These subscriptions normally cost $4.99 per month with the steamer getting a 50/50 split of the subscription fee. Once again, all Amazon Prime accounts are able to subscribe to one streamer for free. Despite it being free subscription, money is still provided to the streamer as if it was paid for. There is one hurdle that we can work to overcome but it will take your help. It only requires minimal action on your part once monthly.
The free (twitch prime) subscription does not auto renew. It does require the twitch user to click the subscribe button once a month to renew. Only the paid subscription of $4.99 auto renews. It appears that the free renewal can be completed with the Twitch app in Android but not on the iPhone. At this time, iPhone users will require access to Twitch via the mobile browser or the use of a desktop computer to subscribe to the free subscription.
To facilitate rewarding subscribers, IONTB will be looking to randomly select subscribers on a monthly basis for giveaways such as IONTB t-shirts, vinyl IONTB stickers, IONTB hats, various merchant gift cards and so much more. This will serve as a invaluable reminder to renew your free (prime) monthly subscription.
For those of you that have already seen one our videos on Twitch, you may have noticed a 30 second commercial at the start of the video and intermittently during the stream. Those ads will not be shown to subscribers to IONTB. That is part of the benefit of subscribing to IONTB.
In a recent survey on the IONTB Facebook page, over 2000 people or 77% of those that responded stated that they have Amazon Prime. We have nearly 70,000 Facebook followers. Imagine the possibilities if only small percentage of IONTB followers took under 30 seconds once monthly to resubscribe to IONTB on Twitch at no cost.
This is an absolutely a win-win situation for everyone involved. This would allow for the ramping up of our operations. Just a few of our needs are adding support personnel to assist with comment moderation, increasing website bandwidth, modernize the IONTB website, a 4K high definition video camera with interview microphones, additional access to expensive public records to allow for additional story follow up, increased drone flight operations, and other necessary technology. In addition, live streaming with high quality video uses an extreme amount of data which has comes a very high cost.
None of this affects how items are currently being posted. You will still see our posts on Facebook, Twitter and on our website. Primarily, it will be only our live streaming videos that will be on Twitch.
Like me, you are probably asking yourself, what is the down side? If you figure it out, let me know. We hope you can invest that much into this endeavor which has brought news to the community since 2013.
Getting a Twitch Prime account is easy. Go to http://twitchprime.com
Once you have a Twitch account, it is as easy of searching for IONTB and clicking the Subscribe button in the Free Subscription with Twitch Prime section.
Once again, I am only asking for a few minutes of your time to help fund IONTB with no monetary obligation to our followers.
Become part of Team IONTB and let’s elevate our local news to the next level.
Can I count on on your to support IONTB to become what I always dreamed it would be?
Video below showing how easy it is to link your Amazon Prime account to Twitch