A lot of word-of-mouth and attention is brought to a game via streamers and broadcasters. Such examples of this occurrence is Amnesia:The Dark Descent, Indrid and Meastro's Casts on Dawn of War II modded games, and Day9's Daily streams and VODs that have catapulted him in the Starcraft community and had an effect on that international scene.

I believe that such grass-roots initiatives should be encouraged within the game either via some form of built in voice recording/video capturing capability or maybe some sort of system that somehow rewards the more prolific streamers for Eternal Crusade.

What do you say to the idea of rewarding streamers with in-game rewards of some kind? Too much? If so, would the aforementioned recording/caputring friendliness of the game be enough?

I personally enjoy watching streamers, but I think streams are a result of a popular game, they don't make a game popular.

Not direct official rewards
They could do as PS2 did, they basically made an server wide event and decided that some of their most high-profile youtubers would be the temporary leaders of one of the factions and they would sponsor the youtube during the period of the event in exchange of close coverage and participation

Of course that is of questionably moral but this is just an example

I think having referral rewards would be the best way of handling it, that way any Streamer/YouTuber/Player could take advantage of them.

I can't believe people would rather watch a game be played than play it themselves. Watching a highlights or some kind of guide on YouTube™ is one thing, but damn...

I'm pretty sure its heresy

Reaching out to some of the well known gaming Youtube channels is a start. Implementing Twitch Support into the game itself would be amazing and go a long way towards getting the game advertised post launch.

No. Due to the fact that the more successfull streamers are already making money (partly due to themselves, partly due to the game they're playing) I hope they don't get anything at all.

Id point you to the league of legends world championships which has been watched by about...8 million?

8 million bots, LoL is DotA with training wheels and inexcusably bad graphics. The reason LoL is so popular isn't twitch, its because ANY computer can run it, its F2P (with a P2W cash shop), its extremely casual, and it came out in a time were the only other competition was the very aged original.

I don't want anything LoL stands for making its way into EC.

Thats so naive of you
League of Legends has had more people watching a single match at one time than americas superbowl, your srsly kidding me that BE Staff dont want that type of publicity? And i dont care what you think of the game itself we are discussing the buisness model which has made it one of the most successful e-sports ever