I’m an explorer. I love venturing to places I have never been and taking friends along with me. It’s the reason I learned French and Russian in college and worked as a water-water river guide, bike shop mechanic, travel agent, and cruise director. But lately I’ve been reminded that distant adventures to far off exotic lands are not only excessive, they are just not necessary, perhaps even stupid.
The first reason local outdoor IRL streams are better is obvious: you are ready for adventure every single day. The only planning required is which of the local destinations you want to see. Traveling 20 minutes by car or train or bus from your home gives you a pretty big range. Let say your starting positions about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from home. Considering the duration of the stream beginning and ending from that position with the mode of transportation and the total area available is immense. For example, by bike at a slow pace of 20kph for three hours this works out to a 50 kilometer radius from home. That’s 7854 square kilometers, plenty of room for undiscovered adventures.
Adventure doesn’t have to be outside. In fact, people seem to really love watching the mundane activities of everyday life like walking through a suburban neighborhood, shopping, going to your local pub, church, or going out to eat—even from a drive-through. Even filling the car with gasoline is interesting. In fact, some of the biggest numbers I’ve ever posted during a live stream where while just walking around randomly in a Walmart. Remember, people watching the stream may never have seen what seems mundane to you. Put on your tour-guide hat and never assume people know the terms you are using.
Add a three-hour driving stream to the beginning and ending of a trip to the outer reaches of your home (on a weekend, for example) and your range increases by 300 kilometers (driving a slow speed). That’s a area covering 384,828 square kilometers, more than the size North and South Carolina combined (222,322 square kilometers). Consider that the entire state of Texas is 696,241 square kilometers. Most people would have a hard time streaming and discovering everything interesting in that range in less than a decade at 3-5 hours a day of daily streaming.
I have been shocked by the number of different things that happen in exactly the same area from day to day on my exact same bike route.
One day a quiet church has the quarterly Boy Scouts Court of Honor for Troop 19 (one of the oldest troops in existence, 150 years) and I got free fuel for the bike trip and a lot of interesting conversations with scouters.
At the Birkdale concert venue there is a different band every weekend, sometimes two different bands on different days. I’ve frequently stopped and gotten to know them.
I ran into my old friends who run Second Fridays in Cornelius and covered the concert there, getting a few beer in the process and invitations to a tour of a brewery.
I talked to the owner of the horses I pass every day and learned that “insulin resistance” is a problem in horses who get too many apples.
I stopped and had lobster enchiladas when I could not pass up the Spanish classical guitar player in Davidson.
I met Mat and Bella at sunset where Bella played the Tibetan bowls while wearing a bikini.
I got blown away by a thunderstorm (taking shelter with a bunch of baseball kids and family sheltering at the ball park). That storm left several trees down all around my regular route.
I ran into a semi-pro peloton of cyclists and kept up with them for about 20 minutes before dropping.
I’ve had angry motorists stalk me through suburbs looking for a fight.
In fact, people in my community frequently say, “I wonder what adventure will happen to Rob today” even though the bike path is the same. The best adventures often aren’t the ones we go looking to discover, they discover us, and they can happen in the exact same place, every time.
Going on long-distance adventures is extremely expensive—especially now. The cost of one plane ticket with room to carry your bike and all your streaming gear would finance eating out at a fine restaurant for a month or more, and you still have to pay all those eating out prices once you arrive at your destination. Not everyone is made of money (like many of the big travel streamers are). But you know what, nobody cares. You do not need a lot of money to produce a quality outdoor IRL stream, just time and commitment. Ironically, some of the IRL streamers who are famous for travelling abroad get the same or better numbers when they are streaming from their own backyards. I don’t believe it is just because they became well-known first doing the long-distance destinations.
Streaming daily for 3-5 hours a day means you can keep your well-paying day job. No need to take work off, or worse, become completely dependent on your live stream to pay all your bills (a thought that makes me shudder with fear thinking about the dancing monkeys that such streamers become). Having a day job means that you are free to stream how, when, and what you want. You can even stream your work itself or DJ the music of a coworking stream to keep ties with your community during their working day as well.
I’ve been surprised to realize how much people actually like to watch live streams from the hood of a car. I know I like it. Watching truckers is one of my favorite things. Plus it gives a time to talk about stuff and tell stories. Just be sure to be careful with reading text on the road. Consider text to speech if you can, or better yet, have a mod isolate out the most important comments and questions and send them to TTS for you.
I was a cruise director, travel agent, and tour guide in my early days after college and while I was serving as Assistant to the President of the West Indies LDS Mission. The logistics for prepping for travel and making sure to get everything correct is virtually impossible to get right every time. Live streaming comes with exponentially more complications to get right. I’ve lost count how many IRL streamers I’ve heard dedicate enormous amounts of time talking about the complications of something as simple as attending a TwitchCon in another country. Better to limit travel to what can be put in the car for a weekend trip. Also, since you are running it from home anyway you can call your (wonderful) family and have them reset your at-home streaming setup if and when needed without incurring additional costs for cloud hosting and bandwidth.
Need a new cable instantly? Order it from Amazon. There are very few things I cannot have delivered in less than a single day so long as I stream locally. This is doable with Amazon lockers on the road, but why?
Home is where the tools are. Going on the road requires taking them all with you are depending on being able to find them. This might be doable for an overnight trip, or even a week away, but long term is definitely not easy. Watch any of the big traveling, full-time streamers to know why it is a low-paying, full-time job to do what they do.
Home is where OBS is. There are definitely ways to stream from the cloud, but why? The OBS that you stream from every day from your desk is also the best place to stream outdoor IRL as well. It can be completely customized and adapted and doesn’t require expensive online cloud charges.
Charging and maintaining an IRL rig is easiest from home. This is the biggest technical requirement of any outdoor IRL streamer. Nothing shuts down an outdoor streamer faster than a rig that breaks or can’t cover the range required. Every single rig has been custom built and has its own quirks. Just charging the batteries consistently is a huge task on the road, let alone the need to replace cables, sim cards, wireless providers, bad batteries, and even melted cases (which happened to one famous IRL streamer in the middle of India). When streaming locally small adaptations and fixes to the rig can be done daily without the hassle.
I started streaming coding education and still do. The more varied the content the better. Not everything is going to appeal to everyone. If you’re a gamer, keep that content in there as well. Perhaps a Q&A on Discord where people can talk to you directly and see your face (instead of constant POV).
I check the weather every day as I’m closing out my coworking stream. In fact, people notice that and realize their working day is also coming to a close soon. Streaming the “golden hour” and sunsets means that I’m always streaming the most volatile weather time of the day (even though it is the most beautiful). I’ve been hit with radical thunderstorms before, sometimes rather suddenly. I don’t mind as much because I know exactly what I’m getting into. If I were remote I wouldn’t have the choice. I’d either be stuck in it no matter what, or hold up in my expensive hotel waiting for it to go away. By streaming from home I can adapt and just do a regular from-home (Zwift) stream or even go shopping instead. This simply isn’t an option unless I’m close to home.
I came in soaked in lake water from swimming at sunset. I hadn’t planned on it, but I was able to do it because I knew I wasn’t going to have to dry out my clothes or get naked in my tent that night. Had I been biking across some large expanse I might still have done it, but been more meticulous and less random about it. I can take more healthy risks and be more spontaneous.
Spontaneity is the opposite of safe when streaming from a distance, unknown locale. Any number of things can go wrong. You don’t know the “good” and “bad” areas. You don’t know where the hospitals and bike shops are. You don’t even really know where you are going to sleep every night unless you have a ton of money and prep time. All of that goes away when streaming from within range of your home.
I left my teeth in the street on a live stream and was rushed to the ER. My stream literally kept me from going into shock while at the hospital. My wife was able to come get me. The hospital admitted me because I have insurance that is recognized locally. Consider for a moment that none of that would happen had I been traveling abroad. No thank you, I’ll say right here near my home.
Not only are you safer, but your are the local legend of your area, the expert. Think about it. Would you rather watch a foreigner who has no intimate knowledge about the area they are in or a local who has grown up their whole life and sharing their insights and historical anecdotes with you, a personal tour-guide of sorts? I prefer the latter and I would bet money that most people also do. There is something to be said for the attraction of watching people discover new things in foreign lands, but I’ll take a local discovering even more interesting things in their own land every single time I’m given a chance.
For example, I regularly watch a guy from France wandering the streets of Paris. OMG! It’s amazing. “I wonder what they are doing in this ancient church tonight?” Turns out they are preparing for a choral festival and singing incredible music that comes through the headphones amazingly. Would a foreigner even have known about the church? Would a non-local have dared to enter it and speak with the people? NO!
In fact, I’ve grown to be a little annoyed at some streamers who are simply traveling and streaming their travels without really getting to known the people and place that they are visiting. They are like the worst of tourists I used to have to deal with all the time when it was my day job. I’d rather not watch them. Give me a local re-discovering their own backyard any day over them.
Not only are you a “local expert” of your own home area but so are a lot of your favorite community members. As counter-intuitive as it seems, viewers love to watch their own locales being streamed. Just watch any of the big IRL streamers for any amount of time and figure out where the people are coming from and you will see that often more than 30% of those viewing are from that exact same place.
I’ve pondered why this is a lot on my stream. The reason is less important, but I think it is because people like to see their area showcased. It gives them something to talk about with authority. Frequently, people will say, “I’m 10km due north of you right now” because they relate to that location. They will use the names of the shops and schools in the area. They will offer interesting and relevant history of that area, sometimes personal. People like feeling like they are there with you on stream, and some even join you. I’ve been randomly joined by members of my community a few times (always in a good way) and I couldn’t be happier. Those who aren’t from the area can relate to more members of the community who live in your area and they can help answer questions about it when I’m not always available. None of this is possible when visiting remote areas (although people from those remote areas love to help visitors make their way through “their” streets).
I bike about 50km on every stream. When I get home I’m sweaty, hungry, and tired. If I had come back to a tent or expensive hotel I would never be as comfortable. I can grab a normally-priced beer from the fridge and talk to my family about the days adventures. Then I can snuggle up in my very warm bed (that I didn’t have to put up in a tent while exhausted) and just relax reviewing the days adventure. My sleep is deep and sound so I’m rested and healthy for the next day. None of that would happen if I travelled abroad, well, not without paying an exceptionally large amount of money for it. So I’ll continue to adventure from home and become and ever better expert about the area I call home these days. Here’s to hoping you rediscover your own home as well.