Spanners 🔧🔧

I’ve been accused of putting the non-F1 preshow chats behind a paywall. I think that unfairly characterises why I’ve made this change. Currently, I stream live on the Missed Apex Patreon page for supporters, and the whole stream remains available to watch back afterwards. I upload the trimmed video to YouTube as soon as the recording is finished. To offset the delay in getting it onto YouTube, I start much earlier than before whenever possible. A bit of history might help explain how I got here. Originally, I started the stream with a countdown or loading screen, then went straight into recording the podcast. That left dead air at the start of the YouTube video, and any technical problems only became apparent once I’d started the episode. So I began chatting and saying hello to the panel and the live audience while I checked everything was working. Thus, the preshow was born. It was never planned as a feature or part of the content. As a former radio presenter, it was easy for me to slip into those chats, and it became a nice way to launch the stream. I also started adding it to the end of the Patreon audio feeds, which people seemed to appreciate. But that left me with a bloated F1 video with a load of non-F1 chat at the start. Nice for people watching live, perhaps, but I got plenty of complaints from people who just wanted the F1. I tried uploading trimmed versions, but that meant having two copies of essentially the same video. Making the original stream private or unlisted caused its own issues. YouTube’s built-in editor was too unreliable and took forever. For a good while, I used timestamps so people could skip straight to the F1. You wouldn’t believe how many complaints I still got, even with that timestamp being the first thing I mentioned every stream. There was also a more personal side to it. I started getting people trolling me about things I’d shared in the preshow. Have a go at my F1 opinions by all means—that comes with the territory. But bringing that same negativity to a story about a school play or my cat started to grate on me. In the end, it made sense to stream the recording to the patrons, who are more likely to enjoy that personal chat alongside the show. They can watch it live or hear it at the end of their audio episode, while the public YouTube video gets straight to the F1. So I’ve ended up in the odd position of being hammered for including the preshow in the first place, then accused of putting it behind a paywall when I moved it. The volume of messages about this has honestly surprised me.

Is Rafa washed?