Alright, now that I got that out of the way...
First of all, I am completely in favor of finding more ways for people who produce tournaments and streams to finance their efforts. That produces more and better events for players and allows for upgrades in all aspects of the event. That's a good thing. People look at the debacle that was Canada Cup's stream and try to turn it into some "money = bad" equation. Kill that noise. That stream's undoing wasn't the monetization. It was the incompetence exhibited in implementing it.
We've all heard the expression "make them an offer they can't refuse." That's typically the best way to get people to pay extra, right? Overwhelm them with value; that's business 101. The expression isn't "make them an offer they'll want to refuse, and then make them pay to do so," is it? Of course not, because that would be stupid. That's pretty much exactly what the Canada Cup stream did, though. They chose to cripple the standard product in order to justify the existence of a premium product. That's bad business.
Sure, they wouldn't put it to you like that, but that doesn't change the fact that that's what they did. They ran ads as often as 15-20 times per hour, which is completely ridiculous. Compare with any other broadcast medium. Do you see commercials after every basket in basketball games? After every first down in football games? Moreover, do they put ads right at the height of the excitement? Do they let advertisements kill the drama? Of course not, that would be stupid. But that's exactly what happened on the free Canada Cup stream.
But what about the bonuses that users got for their $8.95? Ad-free streams? Yeah, awesome deal you get there. Now, instead of an ad every five minutes, you get to watch commentators talk about how you weren't watching an ad until the ad you weren't watching ended. 720p?
Does this look like 720p to you? Also, apparently many premium viewers were getting ads anyway. On multiple occasions the TwitchTV ads were run direct on the stream, cutting off the commentators in mid-thought. All of these things are frustrating but bearable on a free stream. All of these are also completely unacceptable on a premium stream. The ironic thing is that the subscription actually gained some kind of actual value due to yet another of their failures: running ads over actual match footage.
Now, it's important to understand that they did not run the ads over actual matches intentionally. The ads are not timecoded to synchronize with the on-screen action. Whenever they send the command to play the ad, the ad will play. If your feed is 30 seconds behind, it doesn't matter; an ad will play right then...even if there's still a match going on.
Even if it's not their fault technically, though, they're still to blame. The fact that this was a problem just demonstrates how ridiculous the frequency of ads was. If you don't have enough down time between matches to run an ad without risking it overlapping the actual gameplay, maybe you shouldn't be running an ad right then. Ignorance is not an excuse. If you don't understand how the ads work, maybe you shouldn't plan on running hundreds (yes, hundreds) of them over the course of the stream. This is just common sense and basic respect for your viewers. There is no justifiable reason for not being aware of the problem well beforehand.
There's a reason groups like Team Sp00ky, Level|Up, IPlayWinner, FinestKO, and others have been broadcasting for a long time now and this issues such as these have rarely, if ever, occurred. Have they had problems? Sure, all of them have. Have they had problems on this magnitude? Absolutely not. Why not? Experience, due diligence, and the good sense not to overextend themselves got them to where they are today.
The bottom line is that, although the "Freemium" monetization method is a good one and one I'm particularly fond of, the people involved didn't have the preparation, experience, or plain common sense to implement it. What's worse, because of their incompetence, they have potentially hurt the market for other, more qualified streamers and tournament organizers to use a similar model in the future.
