The winestream will be back for season 5 – but not on Twitter

I have good news and bad news. First the good news. The Saturday Night Winestream is scheduled to be back May 6, 2023 at its regular time from 10-11:30 PM Eastern. In spite of the late start, season 5 is somewhat on track for a Saturday night debut, albeit without some of the films that I had planned to have restored and ready to show. This was entirely due to a little side show called Drink With Rick Rewine, which launched on the new 100TV Network today. Nevertheless, I am getting things ready to go and hopefully the winestream will happen without a hitch.

Now for the bad news. Last week I received news from the Twitterverse that Mr. Musk and company shut down Twitter Media Studio, or at least cut off access to it by regular folks like me. Sure enough, when I tried to access Media Studio, it was no longer available. What makes it bizarre is that when I attempted to do so, it takes me to a whole series of pages promoting Media Studio and talking about how great it is, but with no links to get there and no explanation as to how to find it. This makes the experience rather frustrating, and more than a little weird.

What this means is that I have no way to access Media Studio to set up my stream on Twitter. Now, I’ve been told that using a streaming service such as Restream will allow you to do it, but you still need to acquire a stream key. I use Castr.io to multistream, and I do have a stream key for Twitter, but it seems to either be broken on the Castr platform or blocked. Even so, whenever I set up a Twitter stream in the past, I always had to create a broadcast event and activate it in Twitter Media Studio before it would go live there, even with my permanent stream key. Perhaps Restream users have something I don’t? I don’t know. All I know is that I can no longer stream on Twitter.

Not that it was a really big deal anyway. Yes, I did have viewers, but almost no active engagement. I might as well have just tweeted out a link to YouTube or somewhere else instead, which is probably what I’m going to do from now on.

Unless I find a replacement for Twitter during the next few days, season 5 will only be streaming on four platforms. If you were watching the show on Twitter @drinkwithrick, you can still watch and participate in the live chat on YouTube, Twitch, Odysee, and the Drink With Rick Facebook page*.

Suggestions for alternatives are welcome and will be considered. If you know of any other platforms that are set up for streaming video, please let me know in the comments below.

*until Facebook does something stupid to screw that up again.