Livecamp stories: Ghost Commander
Meet the Twitch streamer-turned-entrepreneur.
When Twitch surpassed most TV networks with over 900,000 concurrent viewers earlier this year they became become a cultural phenomenon, challenging traditional entertainment channels offline and IRL.
Camp, our thematic accelerator program at Betaworks, is currently focused on frontier technology at the intersection of live streaming and audience participation. This theme attracted companies building live streaming infrastructure (Content Flow), native live streaming app experiences (Bunch, Journey, Culture Genesis) and, the focus of this post, a new entertainment concept built for Twitch — Ghost Commander.
And who better to build the next generation of entertainment on the world’s fastest growing entertainment platform than a co-founder duo consisting of a Twitch streamer with 10 years experience in the industry and a graduate of immersive theatre and architecture. Below, I pose a series of questions to Ghost Commander co-founder, Keenan Mosimann, to understand more about the motivation behind building Ghost Commander and the biggest challenges he and his co-founder, Lauren Liedel, currently face.
S- Who are you and what did you do before starting Ghost Commander?
K- I’m Keenan Mosimann, a livestreamer (250K followers on Twitch) and YouTuber (~1 million subscribers) and I’ve been producing entertainment online for about 10 years now. I went to school at USC studying game design, where I met my co-founder, Lauren Liedel, whose background is in immersive theatre and architecture. We shared a vision for how live streaming could change theatre productions and how a live digital audience could be used to shape a narrative that’s playing out on camera. That’s where Ghost Commander came from — a marrying of her background and mine.
S- What are you working on?
K- At a high level, Ghost Commander is an interactive haunted house where online viewers on Twitch can direct both the ghost hunters exploring a haunted house and the ghosts triggering traps in that house. The ghost hunting team are trying to banish the ghosts from our live location, while the ghost viewers are trying to thwart their efforts by causing scares and other hijinks. We use a Twitch extension to give the viewers the power to pick their team and to give direction to both the ghost hunter actors as well as the ghosts and to shape the events of the night. Think of it as a pseudo-competitive board game meets reality TV show played with live actors in a haunted house.
“Think of it as a pseudo-competitive board game meets reality TV show played with live actors in a haunted house.”
S- Explain your product in 3 words?
K- Themed interactive show.
S- What has been your biggest challenge so far during the Betaworks Camp program?
K- I think it’s been pulling together and stitching together two very different professions — i.e. to marry the technical features and affordances of this online interactive extension with the interpersonal, live performance of actors and a live action setting. The challenge is to make sure that those two work together and not against each other.
S- Where do you hope to be by Camp Summit?
K- We hope to have run two pilot episodes by then which will not be the full realisation of the concept, but will at least be a feature complete version that demonstrates the goal or the high level concept/pillars we’re trying to embody.
S- Why did you apply for Betaworks Camp?
K- It was very much thanks to Kyra Reppen [CEO of Katapult, a Betaworks Ventures portfolio company] — I’ve known her for a few years after having done some consulting work with her in the past. When she heard about the livestream focus for this year’s Betaworks Camp, she reached out to me immediately saying “this is right up your alley — you can bring them any of your current projects or design something new from scratch”. Plus, there aren’t any accelerators out there that are as specific as the Betaworks Camp program. And out of all the sectors, Livecamp (live streaming, new media) is my thing which meant I could also bring my expertise to the Camp program.
S- Why did you build this product?
K- Ghost Commander is a sort of distilled combination of what Lauren and I have been working on for the last 3 years. I realised there was something special with audience interactivity as a genre when I ran the first tests of this format on my channel and saw 7x the engagement and return from my viewers, as well as a desire from them to have it become regular programming on my show. These experiments were all very manual, one-off experiences but they were able to educate the design philosophies and pillars that went on to shape Ghost Commander.
“I realised there was something special with audience interactivity as a genre when I ran the first tests of this format on my channel and saw 7x the engagement and return from my viewers…”
I have yet to see other examples of shows like this that motivate viewers in quite the same way. For those that are hyper fans, it gives them new ways to interact with the streamer and new levels to support a show they follow. Traditionally, you show your support by paying money — which would be how you traditionally differentiate a hyper fan from a typical fan — even if the one who doesn’t pay has watched every piece of content since your channel started. The interactivity that Ghost Commander creates is a way of making more tiers for people to support you as a streamer with both their money and their time. If it is the latter, it allows for them to enrich the experience for everyone else based on the time they put in and everyone watching benefits. It’s no longer just money as the input, which makes showing support for streamers more accessible to fans through the interactive format we’re creating with Ghost Commander.
Additionally, from a platform perspective, it’s clear that Twitch are looking for new ways to engage with users and make them feel more involved with the streamer they’re watching. The next step is making them actually responsible for the content they’re watching. We see this concept as the future of interactive entertainment as a medium.
S- If you could get introduced to one person to help the development of your product, who would it be?
K- Jeff Bezos — when Amazon bought Twitch they could clearly see a future in interactive and gaming entertainment. Now they’re focusing a lot of time, energy and investment into original content for Amazon Prime video. I think Ghost Commander sits at the intersection of those two things — the combination of original produced video content and the interactivity of Twitch. If Jeff won’t return my call, I’d happily chat with Ryan Brockington, the head of Global Brand Creative for Amazon Prime Video or Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch.
During the 12-week programming at Camp, we invite highly-relevant industry experts and founders to come to Betaworks and share their insights with Camp teams. I’ve had the good fortune to sit in on many of these sessions and observe the energetic discussions that follow. One theme that continues to surface is how to engage the elusive and often misunderstood Generation Z (people born between 1995–2010). This has surfaced as a pain point for both Camp companies and even for some of our experts. What’s exciting about Ghost Commander is how engaging the content has the power to be, whilst being distributed on a platform that already counts Gen Z as a captive audience. Furthermore, the show format has the ability to democratize access to supporting streamers, by enabling fans to show support through participation, rather than just through dollars.
We’re excited to see what Keenan and Lauren build and the learnings they gain from venturing into this new paradigm of entertainment.
This is the first post in a five-part series that dives into the Livecamp founders’ journeys into the tech industry, their biggest challenges and hanging out at Betaworks.
Betaworks Camp is a thematic 3-month accelerator program at Betaworks, NYC. Stay up-to-date on Camp company announcements and future programs on Twitter: @thebetacamp
