Yosua Ian Sebastian

Watched Lives: Picking a Platform

planted · last tended

These are some of the platforms where I’ve watched online lives, with my rough take on each. This list might get outdated as the platforms keep changing their sites. For the full list of the online lives I’ve watched, see the timeline.

ASOBI STAGE

Link: https://asobistage.asobistore.jp

Note: ASOBI STAGE is different from ASOBI CHANNEL. ASOBI CHANNEL is more like YouTube, a free-to-watch platform, and has a different set of issues from ASOBI STAGE.

Last watched: 2026-06-07, 学園アイドルマスター The 2nd Period Hatsuboshi IDOL FESTIVAL DAY2

Verdict: totally worth it to watch Idolm@ster live in real time!

2026 notes

Gakumas is doing so many lives, and thankfully all of them are available to stream here.

For popular lives like MOIW2025 or the more recent 2nd Period HIF, usually their server is overloaded. So make sure to log in early on the website, and stand by on the video player page as soon as possible. Also open in a different browser for backup, and click play on the player once available. Worst case, it will log you out, you can’t log in, or no video is playing. Last time that happened to me for 2nd Period HIF DAY1, it took almost 20 mins to stabilize and load :|

The 2nd Period HIF also had some troubles, not sure if it’s the ground equipment or the streaming platform. But the video and audio stutter, then play at high speed. Thankfully the archive is fine.

Also, sometimes there’s a watch-along with the cast, like for the MOIW2025. BUT, they decided not to have an archive for the watch-along. I don’t get the reasoning. Is it to avoid getting clipped and preserved forever on the internet? DRM won’t stop real camera recording. Meanwhile, a regular human has real-life commitments. There are times where you can’t dedicate a specific timerange of your life to sit and watch. Well too bad, no archive for you.

Older notes (2024–2025)

2025 notes

Sometimes the 1080p stutters. BUT, there’s 1062p option. That’s not a resolution option I usually see, but it looks good enough, and it doesn’t stutter!

2024 impression

The platform is pretty good, there are no major problems. There are hiccups where video does not play but comments keep flowing, but a refresh or two fixed it. Also the light stick below the video player is a really nice touch. And the fact you can control it with your phone is a proof they’re putting a lot of effort into this.

Archive also works great, their viewing period is a bit short though, around 2 weeks or so.

A slight annoyance: the comments section often stop scrolling midway during live, scrolling manually to the bottom can fix it. But often it also scrolls the main view instead of just the comment section. Not sure if this is specific to my environment or not.

eplus

Link: https://ib.eplus.jp

Last watched: 2023-03-18, hololive 4th fes.

Verdict: avoid if possible 👎

Okay-ish for watching the live stream. Unusable for watching the archives. Getting a bunch of audio issues on the archives like noises and out of sync, after a while, no audio plays.

hololive official fanclub (service ended as of January 2024)

Link: https://hololive-fc.com

Note: It’s subscription only with no one time ticket, barely counts.

Last watched: 2023-11-22, variety show with Matsumoto Rika as guest.

Verdict: service has been discontinued, nothing new here 🤷

Latest impression

No issue from the streaming side. But the way they handle the end of service wasn’t great. There’s only 2-3 months gap between the announcement (2023-11-30) and the closure (2024-01). And no partial refunds for those paying annual subscriptions. Sure now they’re hosting all the contents for free now, but there’s no way these archives will be hosted online forever.

Now hololive is hosting their exclusive content on YouTube membership instead.

(Also their announcement page doesn’t load when opened from Internet Archive. Which means their website kinda sucks according to my personal standards.)

Older notes (2023)

Previous impression (2023-06-18)

A relatively new hololive exclusive platform, showed up at early 2022. Surprisingly decent considering it’s their own platform and doesn’t have the same problem with Niconico even though they list Dwango in the footer1.

Their website feels weird though with all commenters’ name feels generated (2023-06-17: Seems like this is no longer the case, names are no longer bot-like). And most of the videos views and comments are weirdly exact multiples of thousand.

Also, they stopped supporting Firefox on 2023-05-302. Which is a sad thing, but not a deal breaker.

Niconico (Dwango)

Link: https://live.nicovideo.jp

Last watched: 2023-03-15, Nornis 1st live

Verdict: video stream quality sucks, archive not included 😭

Same old nico nico douga but with different name. Functionally, it’s great. Practically, I can’t like it.

Last time I watched Nornis’ live, it’s still stutter on lowest stream quality. I don’t know if what’s causing it, but Niconico connection to Indo has never been good regardless of ISP. Plus, to watch archive (Timeshift in Niconico) you need to subscribe to their premium service(2023-06-17: cost JPY 550 per month).

OPENREC.tv

Link: https://www.openrec.tv

Last watched: 2025-11-01, 第１回 お花さん みーてぃんぐっ！ (day, night)

Verdict: Good! I didn’t know this website has ticketing

Notes

I’ve been on OPENREC.tv for watching uchitore stream. It’s a subscription-based model with monthly billing. And when uchitore announced their first event, I didn’t expect it to be on the same website… Which is great! Also there’s discount when already subscribed, not sure if limited to this event only or not.

The video player / viewer itself is pretty much the same as the usual stream. Relatively good, all basic functionalities are there. The most unique thing is that you can adjust the forward/backward seek time. Usually this is hardcoded and only offline players have this.

The chat overlay in the fullscreen or theater mode is a bit annoying though. It overlays either on the left or right side, and sometimes covers the view. Better stay windowed and maximize the window instead.

SPWN

Link: https://virtual.spwn.jp

Last watched: 2022-03-20, hololive 3rd fes “Link Your Wish”

Verdict: pretty safe choice if available 👍

Latest impression (2022-ish)

So far the most platform I’ve been using and has the least problem with. From time to time has bad connection to Indo even after turning on low latency mode on their video player.

Stagecrowd (JP)

Stagecrowd has 2 separate sites, JP and international. This will be for the JP site.

Link: https://stagecrowd.live

Last watched: 2025-08-03, 陽高真白 presents　「☆夏の大暴走まつり☆ 〜ハジける準備はできてるか〜」

Verdict: okay-ish website and has DRM protection for the stream

Impression

Video streaming itself is okay, basic funcionality is there. No stream quality issue too. Theater mode hides the chat for some reason, but that’s just my pet peeve. For the event I watched, the archive is available for 1 week.

But the stream itself is DRM protected. So, no archival (yet) for this one. Looking at the manifest, it’s CENC. Seems like there’s an open PR for it in yt-dlp, might be doable in the future.

Outside of streaming, the user registration is really bad. I had to register twice, on iccomotto.com and stagecrowd.live. I think it’s because the event is limited to FC only, which is another paid subscription. (I probably could figure it out if read everything, but I just want to watch these 2 events.) And both registration requires JP address and phone number. Why would you need all these just to watch an online live stream? 😣

YouTube

Link: https://youtube.com

Note: member only live, barely counts.

Last watched: once a month

Verdict: probably the live you want to watch is not here 😔

It’s YouTube. They probably have the best infra for running live stream in the world right now.

But they don’t run ticketing for one-time watch.

Zaiko

Link: https://zaiko.io

Last watched: 2026-04-18, 薄井友里・川村玲奈のすーぱーかわちぃ☆ゆりれいしょん レク3〜おはにゃみ〜!

Verdict: works great except for the occasional stutters

Latest impression (2024-05-05)

Honestly I forgot about this site until I tried to buy a new ticket this year. Then I realized I have an account already in my password manager.

I don’t remember anything noteworthy from the first impression. Which is a good sign, no major issue back then.

But during the FLORIST live, there are stutters. And it’s the type where the stream repeats the stuttered part. e.g. lyrics: one two three, stream: one two two three. “Hmm, is it a remix? I don’t remember this part” is what I initially thought. Turns out no, it was stream issues.

I don’t see change in graphic quality during stutters. So I doubt it’s caused by the “auto” quality in the video player settings. Which should result in video downgrade if the player decides to lower the quality during the stutter. I also don’t see the stutters during archive playback.

Other than that stutters, Zaiko works great.

Some neutral stuffs:

Z-aN

Link: https://www.zan-live.com

Last watched: 2025-08-30, ASU 2nd ONE-MAN LIVE “BIRTH”

Verdict: superb, my first choice these days 🌟

Latest impression (2024-12-28)

At this point, I believe troubles doesn’t exist for Kamitsubaki x Z-an combination. Smooth live, good video and audio quality, works on Firefox, and watch archive works! (Even during ~8 hours long stream, it’s relatively smooth)

I also tried from Firefox + Linux and Safari + iPadOS combination, they’re superb!

Older impressions

Previous impression (2023-09-13)

Watched yet another big event, and there’s a blackout mid stream. No sound, no video. They said the troubles only last 90s, but it felt like forever3. With the live comments still running, I saw a lot of frustrated comments. That makes me feel sad. It was a theatrical type event and setting the mood was pretty important. And the blackout ruined the mood buildup for me.

With all the recent troubles, I’m starting to lose faith in Z-aN 🙁

Previous impression (2023-09-03)

Still my favorite platform, everything from my first impression still applies (assuming the site isn’t down if they’re hosting a big event with >100k viewers). And they even fixed the errors on Firefox.

On 2023-08-26, their site couldn’t handle the load from Hololive Splash Party though4. The live postponed live that day never happened. It become a recording distributed on YouTube and the live ticket refunded. I did not expect them to fail that bad. Live viewers count should be under 200k from my estimates.

Also saw nginx error page from their site that day. Weird feeling but I feel relaxed after realizing they also use some familiar tech in their stack.

Unrelated to the platform itself but I have to say this: if you’re even remotely interested with the idea of a virtual singer singing cool songs in a future dystopian world, you need to watch this live. It’s AMAZING and you won’t regret it.

2023-09-03: KOKO one-man live is just to good I had to forgive Z-aN for their previous issues.

2023-09-03: KOKO one-man live is just to good I had to forgive Z-aN for their previous issues.

First impression & trivia

First impression (2023-06-17)

First time watched on Z-aN, surprisingly a great platform! Good to the point it become a trigger for me to make this notes. From registration flow, payment (it uses Stripe at the moment), stream connection, archives, even bonus digital goods from buying tickets, this Z-aN tick all the boxes.

Other issues

My only gripe is Z-aN is unusable on Firefox. Works smoothly on Vivaldi so I have not tried other browsers. They fixed it as of 2023-08-27! Hooray 🥳

Z-aN video player fail with `The m3u8 file loaded file` error message

On Firefox, after few mins the video player will error out, needing a page refresh

Trivia

Showing date input with 'Please enter your date of birth as a single-byte number.' from Z-aN registration flow

Bonus: Z-aN wants me to enter my date of birth as a single-byte number, I have no idea how to convert a date into a single byte.

Why did you write this?

Starting to lose track with the many live streaming platform out there. As these live streams ticket aren’t exactly cheap, I created this note to avoid using the bad ones if possible. Most of the time there’s no choices though. Even when there are choices, at most it’s 2, it’s pick bad or the less bad one 🥲.

Changelog

Footnotes

  1. In 2026, I learned the existance of Sheeta, a fan club system from Dwango. A lot of streaming websites that I used are actually based on Sheeta, and they all have those Dwango footer. ↩

  2. https://web.archive.org/web/20230617155122/https://hololive-fc.com/notification/114 ↩

  3. https://web.archive.org/web/20230913181459/https://www.zan-live.com/en/news/333#:~:text=Regarding%20the%20livestream%20of%20Blue%20Journey%201st%20Live%20%22Yoake%20no%20Uta%2C%22%20which%20took%20place%20on%20September%2013%2C%202023%2C%20we%20regret%20to%20inform%20you%20that%20there%20was%20an%20incident%20of%20approximately%201%20minute%20and%2030%20seconds%20of%20disruption%20in%20both%20video%20and%20audio%20due%20to%20equipment%20troubles%2C%20which%20occurred%20at%20around%2019%3A33.%C2%A0 ↩

  4. https://web.archive.org/web/20230913181611/https://www.zan-live.com/en/news/328 ↩