I think that might depend somewhat on what the stream is. For instance I watch quite a bit of Zelda Ocarina of Time Randomizer race restreams on Twitch. For those it is much much better to have some up-front ads when I join the stream, which is almost always during the "stream starts in 15 minutes" countdown, rather than to have ads appear mid-race. I don't know how much control the streamer has over this kind of thing, though.
> I don't know how much control the streamer has over this kind of thing, though.
Quite a bit. As long as the streamer is running 3 minutes of ads per hour there will not be prerolls. Ad breaks can be run manually or on a configurable schedule, and scheduled ad breaks can be snoozed for 5 minutes (up to 3 times I think) if they arrive at a bad time.
You can't stack preroll free-time for more than an hour though, so you don't get 5 hours without prerolls by running 15 minutes of ads at once.
Mmm. I think for the channels I watch for these races they pick the "preroll" option and are right to do so, because 3 mins of ads an hour would be pretty obnoxious in a 2.5h race. (For the random-settings races which can go 4 or 6 hours if the randomizer picks silly settings, there are scheduled breaks every 2 hours, which provides a point to run ads. But normal races run right through without breaks.)
I watch mostly through the Android cast-to-Chromecast client though, which might be a bit of a special case -- until very recently it didn't show ads at all, which was presumably a silly oversight on Twitch's part...
