After all that negativity, it’s a relief to head back to OfflineTV. Members of OfflineTV began to stream themselves having regular interactions, completely separate from games. One member, Lilypichu, began streaming herself drawing and playing music, with other members of the house joining in. Before long, members were frequently streaming aspects of their daily lives. For example, members of the house would often play video games during the day as individuals and then stream playing board games together as a group.

Twitch was designed as a gaming platform so content is organized by whatever game a streamer is playing at the time. Twitch has an “IRL” (“in real life”) section for people who are live recording themselves doing daily activities. The streams gained lots of popularity, and the entire IRL section is now dominated by people affiliated with OfflineTV.

So what makes these IRL streams so interesting and exciting? You’re just watching people go around their lives with no script, structure, or editing. Admittedly, these are people who for years have been recording themselves so they’re pretty good at constantly providing entertaining content, but even so the draw of this over standard fare might not be too apparent. However, OfflineTV does a lot of stuff which standard reality cannot.

First is much more organic. If a streamer does something viewers like, they will do it again the next day. If they do something audiences are uninterested in, they might stop. This allows interesting interactions to rapidly snowball. For example, when Lilypichu was trying to learn how to dance the entire house ended up getting involved providing lots of hilarious moments. Dance lessons became a recurring event. The board game streams emerged because everyone was having a great time and the audience was loving it.

Lilypichu, one of the streamers in the house wanted Korean Pop dancing lessons from her friend Ariasaki. Because there are so many content creators in the house this random activity snowballed into a recurring event that was streamed on various members channels.

Second, the experience feels far more real because there is no separation between actors and support staff. Many of the camera people and managerial staff live in the house and are characters in their own right. Some of the most powerful moments occur among members who don’t stream games at all. In one stream Fedmyster, the editor for OfflineTV’s Youtube channel, reflected on how well OfflineTV was doing. He started talking about the death of his alcoholic father and how he dropped out of college to support his mother. He risked everything to join a experimental stream house. The conversation between him and Chris Chan, the manager of the house, was incredibly powerful. Today Fedmyster streams often, covering his editing work, interactions with house members, or other miscellaneous content. His stream is often more popular than some of the dedicated streamers in the house. The interactions between the dedicated streamers and the support staff makes the entire experience feel very real and makes standard shows seem transparently artificial by comparison.

Chat sometimes goes completely rogue on its own storylines. Here, members of chat were waiting for a stream to come online and set up a “camp” to wait. They created an entire storyline involving a camp fire running out of control. Viewers are interacting and creating their own stories even when they are watching a black screen.

Third, the audience can interact with the stream in ways which are impossible in standard television. One notable feature of Twitch is “Twitch Chat”, a message board that runs in parallel to a stream. Twitch chat has a lot of problems but OfflineTV has done a good job fostering a (relatively) pleasant community. Streamers will call out and aggressively ban members of chat who are being unpleasant. They also provide opportunities for chat to participate with them. For example, the streamers would frequently play Jackbox games. Jackbox games are games that you play on your phone using a shared screen. My favorite is “Drawful” which is similar to Pictionary except that people use their phones instead of pieces of paper and vote on drawings on a TV screen. The good thing about these sorts of games is that since everyone is on a phone, it’s easy for remote people to participate as long as they can see the shared screen (which is being streamed). OfflineTV would often invite a random member of chat to play with them. In other Jackbox games, one player can be controlled by “the audience” where everyone who has access to the game room can vote on what move they want to do. OfflineTV is a two-way street where the audiences interacts with and influences the actions of the performers.

OfflineTV has become popular enough that even real-world celebrities are fans. Because the content isn’t recorded and edited far in advance housemates can react quickly to opportunities to create surprising content — for example if T-Pain calls and says he wants to hang out with some Hennessy. This was far more surprising to viewers than the scripted, “shocking” moments of reality TV.

Fourth, there’s a deluge of content to sort through. If you want to spend ten hours a day watching OfflineTV, you can — there’s going to be someone streaming. In fact, the onslaught of content can be fairly overwhelming. People sometimes use multi-stream setups to watch multiple people simultaneously (although that seems bafflingly confusing to me) and there are various browser extensions or websites to track all of the activity. There’s also a cottage industry of Youtube channels dedicated to highlights from the activities and compilation threads on the OfflineTV subreddit if you are just interested in the highlights. Whether you’re in the hospital spending eight hours a day watching the streams or just catching up on highlights for fifteen minutes, the show is an enjoyable experience.

Fifth, the members of the house are kind to each other and somewhat aspirational figures. The show I’ve most often seen OfflineTV compared to is Terrace House, the Japanese show about housemates living together that is notable for how kind and respectful the housemates are to one another. For example, when DisguisedToast bombed out in last place of an online tournament he was competing in members of the house came and gave him hugs and gave him encouragement. The streamers frequently talk about how inspired they are by those they live with to work hard and constantly come up with new content or ways to interact with the community. Reality TV shows that throw contestants together can’t have the same level of cohesion as a group of friends/significant others who have lived together for months or years.

The Future is Bright

I really need to write faster. I started this post about two months ago just as OfflineTV was taking off, and since then the group has exploded in popularity. The main gathering spot for fans is the OfflineTV subreddit. It was founded in July 2017. On December 31, it had 754 subscribers. As of today (March 10) it has more than 50,000. Posts from the subreddit frequently make it to the top of reddit.

The most popular clip on the subreddit. DisguisedToast and the streamer xChocoBars had been flirting for months, leading to this moment.

While OfflineTV has had some celebrities take notice, it’s still far from a mainstream phenomenon. But it feels very much like a show of the moment. In a world where millenials are facing catastrophic financial uncertainty it’s cathartic to watch people who are wealthy but don’t spend money on bling but rather on each other (except for that one time where they spent hundreds of dollars on claw machines). In a world where there are all sorts of memes about having nothing to do on a Friday night it’s nice to participate with other people in games even if you can’t be there in person yourself. In a world of wholesome memes in a sea of internet nihilism I’d rather happy people having fun rather than miserable people competing for a cash prize or whatever (yes there are plenty of reality TV shows that don’t do this).

Younger people are moving away from television, or at least cable; moving away from watching scheduled episodes and moving towards binge-watching instead; engaging with their favorite media franchises online and with fan art. OfflineTV capitalizes on all of these trends. In ten years don’t be surprised if the hottest shows people are watching look a lot like the ebullient fun of OfflineTV.