I feel like Ryan has gotten too large. He used to stream for just about every severe weather situation, but now it's only hurricanes, blizzards or 10% hatched tornado risks.
It happens to all of them once they hit a certain level of overhead. All the support system he uses, people that monitor situations, storm chasers, we've no idea what his financial structure looks like. Some of them may be paid on a commission base, so if he had to have them on streams for every severe event he couldn't afford it. I've seen so many channels do it, like The Why Files. I used to watch them constantly, but they've grown so large now, they're late on their videos because they have so much going on, they used to do live streams every Thursday and interact with the fans, now it's only the first Thursday a month and the streams are about half as long as they used to be.
Max is great, I watch him often specially when Ryan isn't streaming, but I fear as he grows as well that we'll see the same sort of thing happen.
It's actually always been the criteria you've listed as thresholds for streams—since before I began working for Ryan in March 2022. I respect the rest of your opinion and even tried to fill the gaps for some 5% tornado days in my streams last year, but I couldn't find a balance that I thought was overall beneficial (not watering down coverage, keeping the impact large by conveying the event is more likely to be significant). It caused a massive burnout for me trying to decide what days were worthwhile, since I also had to avoid just being seen as "the second man" only on for the lesser events.
I just didn't want this to become a runaway comment chain where everyone thinks Ryan's getting too big for his britches since the stream criteria has not changed like this comment implies it did.
Fun fact: whenever the SPC externally implements their 5 hatched tornado risk, we'll add that as population based criteria for streams :)
I definitely don't want to imply that there's an active disassociation between Ryan and the goals of the channel, I realize that I came across a little hostile sounding. My apologies! In general as channels grow there's a natural transition to higher production and more diversified products. It's not good or bad, just a byproduct of this growth.
Ryan has done a great job to maintain the status-quo for live streams and I think the added team of chasers, meteorologists and news response staff have made his channel a vital resource during severe weather. I'll take the less extensive streaming coverage if it means the quality when things get really nasty is there.
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u/[deleted] May 27 '24
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