It’s so exciting to get another email from Twitch letting me know someone I follow is going live.Kappa Only problem is I have to delete that email at some point because… well, inbox bloat is annoying. As much as I love supporting all my friends who stream or the gaming communities that I enjoy following, it’s hard to keep track of every freaking event I want to follow. We’ve all heard stories about how the Twitch email alerts don’t have that ? accuracy we’d all like. So people end up missing the stream, and the situation makes no one happy, not the streamer or the viewer. Sometimes I’ll set reminders on my phone that a major DotA event or Melee tournament is going on, but I have a life outside of streaming and I must admit I don’t have much time to be an active viewer. So when a friend of mine told me about the new StanzaCal application that could sync your calendar with your favorite streamers or esports teams I was intrigued.
StanzaCal, from the minds behind Stanza.co, is pretty easy to use from both the viewers’ and streamers’ perspective. I went to Stanza.co, clicked on the esports button, and was quickly immersed in the eSports calendar world. I literally had to look for all of 10 seconds before I saw a calendar I had to add to my own. I quickly added the Super Smash Bros. Melee events calendar. All I had to do was click the “Add to Calendar” button, select which device type (I went google) and that snazzy melee calendar was all mine. No more need for scouring Smash.gg or Twitter for news about the latest tournaments – it’s all in my calendar.
Not to mention there are several other esports calendars available from Stanza. So you can literally just fill your calendar up with esports events all day every day and not pay attention to the real world at all if you wanted.
Now let’s flip the script. I’m an on-again, off-again Twitch Streamer (who’s hoping to be more on-again than off-again soon). I’d really like to have a steady schedule that not only helps people follow me on twitch but also establishes a fixed schedule for myself, so I don’t conflict with other streamers or events. Setting up a StanzaCal account was super easy. All you have to do is set up an account and create the event. You can add tons of detail or very little. But it’s great because you can add a location, if you’re at a public event, or an event URL for your Twitch page or something similar.
You can even add your own event calendar to your device, share events via Facebook, twitter, google plus, or email your week of events to followers from your Stanza dashboard. You can even embed your StanzaCal or someone else’s on your site.
Basically, the StanzaCal seems like a really useful application for both streamers and viewers considering how many new streams and esports events are always happening these days. There’s now a way to keep better track of who’s streaming, when they’re streaming, and what events are going on. So you can worry less when you choose to stream DotA and maybe somehow you forgot the grand finales of The International are going on. Or if you totally blanked that The Big House is going on this weekend and made weekend plans that would mean you couldn’t stream grand finals. Getting a gentle reminder on your phone’s calendar is really useful and way easier than setting personal reminders, searching on twitch/twitter, or being the last to know about an esports major and having all your friends talk about how amazing the finals were that you forgot to watch ? .
My opinion of StanzaCal in spiffy giphy form.