 | As we cryptically teased in our "Future of Little Wars TV" video this January, some changes are afoot in our production. These are not changes we plan to discuss in detail on YouTube, so we wanted to give you--our most engaged and interested viewers--a look behind the scenes. In this post we'll talk about the ways Season Two will be different from the first. We'll also dig into some YouTube analytics to explain why we felt the need to make these adjustments to the program. If you've ever found yourself interested in the production side of Little Wars TV and "how the sausage is made," read onward! |
What's Changing?
The overall structure and content of our main wargame episodes will remain the same. We continue to believe that the format of the program--historical background, followed by a great wargame with player confessionals--is why our channel has grown so quickly. Most of the changes we intend to implement are "at the margins" and not major overhauls.
HISTORICAL DEBATE. After listening to feedback from you, our viewers, we've decided to slightly pare down the history in order to spend more time on the wargame. Most of you probably won't even notice the change, but instead of 9-10 minutes of history, we'll be scaling that back in most episodes by at least a full minute. Studying the YouTube analytics across all ten main episodes supports the theory that most viewers are interested in no more than 8 minutes of historical discussion before the game.
THE GAME. Many of our most fervent fans have asked for more game-play. We've been skeptical of extending our episodes beyond 30 minutes, but in Season Two we do intend to spend a bit more time talking about the orders of battle, the miniatures, and give you another few minutes of game-play at the tabletop. The episodes, on average, will be longer than before.
CHALLENGES. We plan to eliminate the "challenge" aspect of the episodes, where the losing team has to endure some kind of humiliation. Gathering our same players together to complete a challenge weeks (or sometimes months) after the game is more difficult than it sounds, and it took a lot of scheduling work just to film a few minutes of silly fun after the fact. Also, about half the audience doesn't even watch the challenges!
The image below is taken from one of our most popular episodes, E103: Agincourt. This is the viewer retention graph and it tells a few interesting stories. Our overall retention rate is incredibly high--almost everyone who makes it past the first 30 seconds will continue to watch the entire 20+ minutes. That's amazing for online video. Our audience is small, but they are highly engaged. The first red arrow shows you the highest level of interest in the video, around the 12:45 mark. What happens here? That's early in the wargame, when the action is heating up on the tabletop--exactly where we'd expect viewer interest to be peaking.
The second red arrow shows you when viewers start dropping off...and dropping quickly. That's when the game is called and the post-battle discussion and challenge occur. This tells us that all the extra work we're doing to film the challenges isn't really what most viewers want to see. In our season one exit survey, many viewers confirmed that while they enjoy the funny challenges, they'd rather see more game-play.
HISTORICAL DEBATE. After listening to feedback from you, our viewers, we've decided to slightly pare down the history in order to spend more time on the wargame. Most of you probably won't even notice the change, but instead of 9-10 minutes of history, we'll be scaling that back in most episodes by at least a full minute. Studying the YouTube analytics across all ten main episodes supports the theory that most viewers are interested in no more than 8 minutes of historical discussion before the game.
THE GAME. Many of our most fervent fans have asked for more game-play. We've been skeptical of extending our episodes beyond 30 minutes, but in Season Two we do intend to spend a bit more time talking about the orders of battle, the miniatures, and give you another few minutes of game-play at the tabletop. The episodes, on average, will be longer than before.
CHALLENGES. We plan to eliminate the "challenge" aspect of the episodes, where the losing team has to endure some kind of humiliation. Gathering our same players together to complete a challenge weeks (or sometimes months) after the game is more difficult than it sounds, and it took a lot of scheduling work just to film a few minutes of silly fun after the fact. Also, about half the audience doesn't even watch the challenges!
The image below is taken from one of our most popular episodes, E103: Agincourt. This is the viewer retention graph and it tells a few interesting stories. Our overall retention rate is incredibly high--almost everyone who makes it past the first 30 seconds will continue to watch the entire 20+ minutes. That's amazing for online video. Our audience is small, but they are highly engaged. The first red arrow shows you the highest level of interest in the video, around the 12:45 mark. What happens here? That's early in the wargame, when the action is heating up on the tabletop--exactly where we'd expect viewer interest to be peaking.
The second red arrow shows you when viewers start dropping off...and dropping quickly. That's when the game is called and the post-battle discussion and challenge occur. This tells us that all the extra work we're doing to film the challenges isn't really what most viewers want to see. In our season one exit survey, many viewers confirmed that while they enjoy the funny challenges, they'd rather see more game-play.
Release Schedule
So far, all the changes we described here are relatively minor. You might not have even noticed them without reading this post. But the biggest change next season is one we suspect everyone will notice: Season Two will likely be shorter than Season One. The individual episodes will be longer, but there may be fewer of them.
Our first season included 70 videos with almost 600 minutes, or six full hours, of content. This is far more than we originally intended to produce back in 2016 and, not surprisingly, it took our club over two years to complete all the filming and editing. We are very much an amateur operation and Little Wars TV is a labor of love--a hobby project. It isn't practical to spend another two years filming a season, which means we will need to attack this problem from two angles: (1) Filming fewer episodes with less additional bonus content; and (2) Finding creative ways to trim down our production time.
How many episodes will Season Two ultimately be? We still aren't sure, but it will be more than five and fewer than ten. And instead of releasing new videos every Tuesday and Thursday, we'll be moving to a steady, consistent pace of once a week.
Our first season included 70 videos with almost 600 minutes, or six full hours, of content. This is far more than we originally intended to produce back in 2016 and, not surprisingly, it took our club over two years to complete all the filming and editing. We are very much an amateur operation and Little Wars TV is a labor of love--a hobby project. It isn't practical to spend another two years filming a season, which means we will need to attack this problem from two angles: (1) Filming fewer episodes with less additional bonus content; and (2) Finding creative ways to trim down our production time.
How many episodes will Season Two ultimately be? We still aren't sure, but it will be more than five and fewer than ten. And instead of releasing new videos every Tuesday and Thursday, we'll be moving to a steady, consistent pace of once a week.
When is Season 2?
Our hope is that we can streamline our production process behind the scenes--partly by involving more volunteers at the club, and partly through modest changes like eliminating the challenges--to produce Season Two much faster than Season One. And it goes without saying that we want to step up the production quality and and deliver even higher quality content than before: bigger games, more miniatures, better audio quality, brighter lighting, and more on-location battlefield filming.
We do have a target date in mind for the premiere of Season Two, and if you've been following the news of our Gettysburg wargame special event, you might be able to take an educated guess at when Season Two might drop. Until then, we hope you'll continue to enjoy our "off season" videos, like Scotch tastings and rule reviews, and keep checking back here on the Free Stuff page for behind the scenes updates on Season Two production. We have some amazing games coming your way!
We do have a target date in mind for the premiere of Season Two, and if you've been following the news of our Gettysburg wargame special event, you might be able to take an educated guess at when Season Two might drop. Until then, we hope you'll continue to enjoy our "off season" videos, like Scotch tastings and rule reviews, and keep checking back here on the Free Stuff page for behind the scenes updates on Season Two production. We have some amazing games coming your way!