Altairation: Episode II

If you were able to join us live or you're here to catch the VOD, thank you. If you were not able to join us live thank you for checking in for the recap. Everyone's support is appreciated.

While captions were not available during the livestream our VOD will be captioned for those that need and want them. However, we want to also do a recap for you all because we understand that your time is valuable and you may not have the ability to sit down to watch (or rewatch) the Altairation. If you'd like to watch the VOD (with subtitles), it's available below:

As always, feel free to scroll down to the bottom the article if you'd like the TLDR.

Changelog

We have some updates since the last Altairation. We received some stellar feedback in regards to pronouns being displayed and their visibility. Going forward users will be able to choose to hide pronouns in chat since they will remain persistent in people's profile card if you click on their username. However, they will never be able to choose to hide someone's pronouns when visiting their profile.

The other update we have is that we were a little overeager in our previous estimates when applying the seasonal model to Altair's Season 0 (aka our pre-season before launching Season 1 to all content creators). This realization enlightened us that we were being unfair not only to you all with delays but our team. We will likely be a team of 10 until Altair can prove it can last.

This initial development stage of Season 0 is not indicative of what future seasons will be. Going forward we will no longer be laying down the foundation of platform which includes, but definitely not limited to, legal and procedural policies and creating technology that can scale as we add onto it.

All of that to say, the important thing we have to share on this update is that Visionaries will be able to complete their registrations and profile onboarding by March 22nd. Registrations will open up to everyone a couple weeks after that as we work out all the bugs. Keep an eye on our Twitter for when that announcement is made.

Chat API

As we mentioned in the previous Altairation, we've switched from Matrix to developing our own chat system which is in heavy development.

The chat API itself will be in GraphQL and will follow the OpenAPI specification which gives us some exciting things:

First, it’ll theoretically allow us to more easily generate adapters for different programming languages. Second, documentation can be auto-generated for those APIs. This gives us a good base to build off of, as we want to make sure going forward we’re providing a first-class experience for our third-party developers.

We don’t have a firm date for release as it is still being polished as we speak, but the moment we're able to get the documentation, we’ll put it in your hands.

Role Management

Now we're onto some new stuff. Roles  and role management will be pretty standard to what most folks will be used to with editors, VIP, and moderators. Editors can update stream title, genre, and access channel insights. VIPs can bypass emote only, sponsor only, and follower only modes, and moderators have all of the permissions of VIPs plus moderation actions.

This is an early iteration that we plan to revisit and expand on in later seasons. We’ll of course be tweaking our version of roles as the platform starts to take hold.

Emotes

We all love emotes and we're very excited to share with you all some pretty spiffy (in our opinion) information on how we're handling them.

First off, some basics: creators will be able to unlock a total of 60 emotes, and the sizes of emotes will be what most folks are used to: 28x28, 56x56, and 112x112 px. The product team definitely discussed alternative options, but the standard set by Big Purple is the one we’re going with. We’re making sure that we’ll be providing the highest fidelity versions of emotes whenever we can get away with doing so.

For every 10 emotes a creator has unlocked, one of those emotes can be animated. So if a creator has unlocked all 60 emotes they can have 6 of those emotes be animated. Also, the file types for these emotes are .png and .gif respectively.

Unlocking Emotes

How will creators be able to unlock emotes though? Well we’re really glad you asked. From the beginning, we wanted everybody to eventually get all of their emote slots.

There will be two methods available for creators and their communities to unlock all of available the emote slots, and the slots will be grouped in sets of 5 when they’re being unlocked. We call these methods the creator and community paths.
The creator path will allow them to unlock emote slots through steps fully within their own power by hitting different milestones such as onboarding a streamer persona for 30 days or streaming for 50 hours.

We do have one small caveat about the number of hours streamed. It is limited to 3 hours a stream as we don’t want creators to feel pressured to stream a lot of hours all at once to unlock the next emote slot.

While the creator path will take a little while to fully unlock all of the emote slots, the community path can help speed the process up as unlocking the next set of emote slots is not limited to one path.

Every time a community member sponsors the creator at least $5 they’ll increase that creator’s number of sponsorship points, and every $5 is 1 point. So, say a member of your community sponsored you for $25, that would equal 5 points.

Going forward you can consider those points “banked”. If that member were to decrease their sponsorship, you wouldn’t suddenly lose the points they previously provided. We don’t want to see our creators push for emote slot milestones only to have fall back down the proverbial hill by the time the next month came around.

Managing Emotes

Now you’ve started unlocking emote slots you have to have tools to manage emotes and to have emotes you have to upload them. We mentioned the required file sizes before but creators can also upload standard (aka non-animated) emotes that are at least 112x112px or larger that remain in a square ratio to be auto-resized. If you choose to use the auto-resizing feature you’ll also be able to choose to upload emotes in batches rather than one at a time.

After these emotes are uploaded there is some information we need from creators before they send them in for approval. The bare minimum we need from them is their prefix and code. For in example avalonWAVE the prefix is avalon and the code is WAVE. Prefixes do not have to be unique so you don’t need to worry about someone else camping the prefix you’d prefer.

If one of your community members currently has emotes from channels that share the same prefix they’ll be choose the emote they’re intending to use from the emote picker, emote auto-completion, or by typing out the emote with the channel ID which is your channel name like so :avalonWave#avalonstar:

Some optional information creators can add to their emotes when uploading or editing them is alt text and the ability to credit the emote artist. At this time, the artist must have an Altair account (they do not need to onboard a specific persona) to be credited. Now that creators have started uploading and managing their emotes there’s one more bit when managing them: choosing if the emote is an active emote or reserved. What does this mean exactly?

Well if a creator has unlocked 10 emotes for the community they’ll technically be able to upload 20 emotes. How this works is that for every slot they’ve unlocked they’ll have that same number of slots for their reserved library slots. For example, if you have unlocked 10 emote slots you will be able to upload 20 emotes to be reviewed for approval. This system will allow creators to easily swap out emotes for holidays, events, or just because they can.

Emote Rewards

Much like gifting on other services, we’ll be providing ways for a sponsor to gift the usage of a channel’s emotes to another member of the community. But the status quo is that while the act of giving can certainly be a net positive, it makes creator income more volatile as a result. We'll expound on that in the next section.

Sponsors that support a streamer for a minimum of $10 will be given a pool of emote rewards to give out. As an example, if a community member were to sponsor a creator for $25, the first $5 of that essentially grants them usage to the creator's emotes. On top of that the sponsor will receive 4 gifts to distribute randomly or to specific community members.

Platform Membership & Creator Revenue

Talking about money can be a little uncomfortable but it is an important topic for us to address.

Platform Membership

We’ve talked about this a few times in the past, but a reminder about platform memberships. They will NOT be required by anyone to use the platform. It is completely optional. Simply said, the fate of Altair is in the hands of the userbase. Not the hands of advertisers. Not in the hands of venture capitalists.

As our sustainability as a company increases through platform membership, we’ll be able to grow the team, as well as increase the revenue split in a creator’s favor. At launch we’ve set our cut to 60/40 in favor of the creator, which is better than most of our direct competitors. Our goal is to one day be able to get that split to 90/10, with the only amount coming out of a creator’s paycheck being relative to the cost it is for us to host their channel.

Creator Revenue

What About Viewers?

Having the talk about money for folks that are not creating on the platform is just as important to us.

The Altair membership and creator sponsorships will default to be non-recurring, and you as the consumer will have an easy way to toggle that functionality on or off as you please.

A question that may have come to mind while we went over the information from before: "What if you’re already sponsoring a channel and want to throw more money at your creator of choice?". Tipping will be enabled! Just keep in mind that tips don’t grant you emote rewards. Also, tips will be split 60/40, just like sponsorships.

We’re giving you the ability to do this on the site as quality-of-life feature. We’re quite mindful of the fact that direct payments, like PayPal, will give you the best bang for your buck. But if you’d like to support us in a small way when you tip a creator, the option is there. And of course, as Altair takes less of a cut on sponsorships, that will also apply to tips.

We know that the way we’re approaching sponsorships, emote rewards, and tipping are different than what many folks will be used to. The reason we’ve made these decisions is because we want to be mindful of not only our creators' finances but the people supporting them.

If you don’t know much about Altair, or about the way our team thinks: this is our big play. We are taking this chance to prove that content creation can thrive in this fashion.

Wrap Up

And that's all for Alt2. We’re planning for Alt3 to be next month, but we haven’t nailed down a date just yet. We’ll make sure to let you all know at least a week ahead as we did with this Altairation. In that third and final Altairation before our public launch, we’ll be covering any further developments and updates, including our launch plans.

Please remember that this launch is not a launch day but a launch period. Also, a reminder that registration, profiles, and onboarding will be made available to Visionaries by March 22nd, and everyone else should have access to it not long after.

Thank you all for taking a little time out of your day to join us, and thank you for your understanding of all the curveballs that’ve been thrown thus far. We’re straightening our pitches out, and the team is feeling both confident and excited as we make our way towards being fully operational. Thank you for your support, and as always, thank you for believing in Altair.

TLDR:

• Changelog news: Viewers will not able hide pronouns on a user's profile if they're displayed, and Season 1 will be pushed back slightly as we finish up features. Account registration and profile onboarding will be available to Visionaries by March 22nd.
• Chat API: We do not have this yet but it is currently being polished. The chat API itself will be in GraphQL and will follow the OpenAPI specification.
• Role management: Creators will be able to add editors, VIPs, and moderators. They will have typical permissions creators are used to.
• Emotes: Creators can unlock up to 60 emote slots. They will be able to have up to 6 animated emotes once they've unlocked all emotes.
• Unlocking emotes: Creators will have two paths to unlock emotes - the creator and community path. They can mix and match paid and unpaid milestones to unlock all 60 slots.
• Managing emotes: Creators will have an active and reserved library to easily swap uploaded emotes for their community's use. They will also be able to add alt text and credit the artist in their management settings.
• Platform membership: A platform membership is not required to use Altair. Users that support the platform via this membership will help us become more sustainable allowing us to increase the revenue split even further in favor of creators.
• Creator revenue: Viewers will be able to support creators via sponsorships and tipping, and both methods will share the same creator/platform split. Tipping will not give viewers emote rewards to gift out it.
• Emote rewards: Viewers will be able to sponsor creators once a month, and if they sponsor them for at least $10 they can begin gifting emote rewards with every $5 increment to the community.