NEW OLD HAVEN, CT — With the rise in popularity of streaming Magic: The Gathering Arena, many new streamers find it difficult when first starting out. Cultivating and retaining viewers can be difficult when your content is buried under large piles of established streamers on daily.
“You know who made the most money during the gold rush?” George Farins, owner of Gran-Gram asked us during a recent interview. “The guys selling the pickaxes. That’s me, only instead of pickaxes, it’s Nanas.”
Gran-Gram is a new kind of business emerging out of the growing popularity of online streamers. The idea is simple, for a fairly low hourly rate you can rent one or several available grandmothers to view your stream and offer viewership and encouragement.
“Gran-Gram was such a help to me when I was just starting out,” streamer ZazzabazzJazz told us Tuesday. “Imagine streaming for eight hours straight with no one watching. Do you talk? Sometimes I would just pretend to be responding to chat to practice, which made things very awkward if a person did enter the stream. Gran-Gram gave me someone positive to talk to while I played.”
“They do such a good job in the Area,” Millie Phillis, a 85 year’s young contractor for Gran-Gram told us. “I don’t know what was happening, but I like the pictures. And they taught me to say poggers, but I still don’t know what it means. It’s probably some kind of sex thing. With kids these days it always is. In my day we didn’t talk about those kinds of things, it was considered unbecoming. My mother would always tell me that, you know. She knew the things that they said and they did but didn’t do and I knew it too, ya know. People just aren’t like that anymore. In my day they pumped the gas and you knew it. But just because the pop went flat didn’t mean the batch couldn’t freeze. I think about that a lot. I like the new stuff a lot too though. The fancy phones are a bit much, but they can do things I never thought they could do. My grandson, he showed me how to do all kinds of things on the ephone. Did you know its buttons change? One minute it’s there and then it’s somewhere else. Who wants to move the buttons on a phone? You want them to stay put so you can remember where to push. I told ’em, I said ‘Johnny you leave those buttons alone or else,’ and when grandma says or else you better believe they listen. Not with the ephone though, he went and changed all kinds of things and now I can’t find anything. Someone calls me and it just rings. If I’m on the bus I’ll have someone else answer it. I’ll say ‘here you do it,’ and sometimes they do but sometimes they pretend not to hear me. And I say ‘that’s what my husband does when I want to do the poggers.’ Am I saying that right?”