The last couple of years have been a wild rollercoaster, and that’s not even mentioning the worldwide pandemic of 2020 and Covid-19.
In late 2018 I joined up with Brendan Sullivan (founder of The Players Club), whom I’ve likely mentioned back in 2014/15 about doing tournaments and live streaming, in his new idea of a stationary streaming studio/arena. He opened a retail store, just big enough to house a couple of tables, next to the vast array of JB Cases he now uses to supply all of the midwest, basically.
I mounted some cameras, worked on a streaming layout, built an audio rig and away we went. 2019 was a great year for us, we grew our audience on Twitch, made it to Affiliate, but never seemed to get the numbers we were after – especially considering the numbers of other streams we’d see on Facebook.
2020 started off nicely, we switched streaming platforms to Facebook and saw a huge increase in our numbers (mostly because people just don’t leave FB once they’re on the site, I’ve realized). Then pandemic happened, but somehow we were able to open a new location, this one with five tables, and 3 streaming tables with 7 cameras around the arena. We did several big PPV matches featuring Justin Bergman, vs Roland Garcia, Justin Hall, and Danny Harriman over the spring/summer 2020.
Fast forward to now (early 2021) and we’re one of the more popular live streams on Facebook in the pool community.
There is plenty of competition out there, to be sure, but our fans and visitors return every night and we always have a lot of interesting conversation on the stream. Brendan does an excellent job at getting the chat riled up while I try my best to keep him within the bounds of something resembling professional and marketable to bigger companies. It’s a well-balanced back’n’forth that seems to appeal to a wide audience.
Hope to see you in our chat someday, we stream almost daily at https://fb.com/stlplayersclub come check it out and join the discussion.