Presenting and accompanying a silent movie a month on Twitch hasn’t worked out as well as I’d hoped, so I’m making a couple of changes. I’ve also added a silent movie schedule to this website. Feel free to bookmark it or link to it.

First, I’m moving to YouTube. While I’m not thrilled with attaching myself too much to Google, it looks like a better choice than Twitch. There’s little live music anymore on Twitch; it’s mostly gaming, DJs, and talk. It pushes content creators toward a weekly schedule, which isn’t practical for the stuff I do. YouTube is a more popular choice for live concerts, not to mention Ben Model’s silent film watch parties. In experimenting on YouTube, I’ve found some other advantages. Twitch doesn’t support private test runs; I’ve already done one on YouTube to work out the details of streaming with OBS Studio. YouTube lets you post links to events in advance, which I find very nice. Finally, YouTube livestreams stay up indefinitely if I want them to.

The other change is that I’ll back off from a monthly schedule. Currently I accompany four silent movies a year at the Plaistow, NH Library; I’ll cut back to running the same movies on the Internet (but a different performance). My next scheduled movie is The Golem, so that will be my online movie for July. I’ll announce the date later, though July 10, following my second-Wednesday pattern, is likely.

As a “public beta test,” I’ll do a short show on June 12. The movie will be One Week, a two-reeler which was Buster Keaton’s first independent film. It shows a newly married couple getting a plot of land and a house-building kit as a wedding gift, and what happens as they try to put it up. It’s heavy on gags, including a famous one which he reused in Steamboat Bill, Jr.. As usual, I’ll provide live, improvised accompaniment, and if all goes well, it will be like my previous shows, only shorter and on YouTube.

Here’s the link for the June show. It should work for watching live or replaying afterward. You can go there and ask for a notification. You can “like” it in advance, which will improve the chances of people discovering it.

Thanks to everyone for your support on Twitch. Hopefully things will work out even better on YouTube.