Ally&Sally + Streaming! 📸✨ (Patreon)

We started our journey to become idols back in 2011, but we've actually been live streaming online since back then too!

We first started streaming on Nico Nico Namahousou back when there were really only a handful of non-Japanese streamers on there. Of course we really enjoyed the creative culture coming from NicoDou back in those days. We would check the video rankings daily to see what crazy stuff was coming out, and the video quality was also much better than YouTube at the time! ✨ Together with the idea that we'd be able to practice our Japanese and maybe make friends with those who like the same things as us all made us want to become Nico Namanushi (Nico streamers)! It also helped that Momoi had a regular live show on there too... That definitely was a big factor! 😆

We'd stream regularly from our bedroom with our anime collection behind us, chat about anime, Japanese and Canadian culture as well as other silly things, sing and dance, and sometimes (attempt) to show off our cat who was always very grumpy about making an appearance! 💕 Our Japanese still wasn't very good then, but it made us really happy to be able to use the skills that we had been practising for a while! There was a tool called Bouyomi-chan that would read comments out for us in a robot yukkuri voice, and it would help so much! Our kanji knowledge back then was still really weak... The quality of the stream was really something too! 💦 It would be sometimes super laggy, sometimes our audio would be howling, there would be CRAZY issues and still we'd get people tuning in! If we think about it now, that's really amazing...! 😂 We somehow had a decent-sized community? Thank you and sorry to all those viewers...

We'd sometimes also do soto-haishin and stream from outside, and even did some off-collab streams with other famous Namanushi back then! It really was so much fun. It's crazy to think of the places some of those people are now... One girl is even in Japanese politics! 😂 We streamed a lot, and of course learned about the do's and dont's too! Back then you would have to pay something like 500 yen to pre-register a 60 minute stream window beforehand to get on a Niconama TV guide-like schedule, and of course, we would always make mistakes when it came to the time zones... We remember one fan getting really upset at us for messing up the time zones (the stream would be just a black screen for the entire duration) saying they'd never support us again because we were never there for the planned time... We still feel bad about it to today! 😭💦 It really taught us importance of the relationship we share and how much trust there is between viewer and streamer. We treasure that trust even more because of that experience. We're really thankful for their harsh (at the time) words that actually came from a place of kindness. 💗

In 2012, Nico Nico Namahousou also launched an English version of the website, and we actually were able to meet Hiroyuki Nishimura at a convention when they had a exhibition booth to advertise the service! We started using it as well shortly after it launched and remember sending our feedback to Hiroyuki personally and even got a response back! When we first went to Tokyo in 2013, we performed at a lot of different live houses, but we were also really happy to be able to visit the Nico Nico Honsha in Harajuku at that time! It was somewhere that was kind of like a "holy journey" to us because we had seen lots of other Namanushi streaming from there before, and we were really happy to be able to do the same there too! It was a lot of fun. We also remember ordering some of their themed food too... We chose the kishimen noodles!! It was... interesting! 😆💦 Of course, we made sure to write in the guest book as well!

However, somewhere along the way we got busy with school, auditions, and live performances, and we kind of stopped streaming around 2014. In 2015, we started streaming again on a new platform called SHOWROOM where mainly only idols (especially the AKB48 family) streamed! ✨ It was a lot more intimate and it was rare to ever get any arashi hate comments there, which surprised us a lot compared to NicoNama! SHOWROOM's main difference from NicoNama was that they would hold big, audition-style challenges that you could participate in. The judging was mostly based on getting your viewers to throw as many gifts (free and paid) for you as possible to help you win the audition... We tried an audition once, but didn't really like the format of it! 💦 We continued streaming on SHOWROOM even after we joined Seishun Gakuen, even daily (at a minimum of 15 minutes) for years straight! We really enjoyed streaming daily because we'd be able to get to talk about and share our day together with everyone and be really close that way! 💗 It was fun and was a really good way to let others know about what kind of activities we were doing as idols in Japan, so we continued even when we came back to Canada in 2018 and did even more together with our group in Vancouver, Seishun Youth Academy!

We started doing more and more on SHOWROOM, but began to realize that there was a sharp drop in viewers because of new changes to the service. Especially because most of our streams were in English then, we decided to switch over to Twitch! It lasted only very briefly though... Since then, we did some Just Dance streams on Twitch just the two of us a bit in 2021 to try and improve at dance as well as get more comfortable with looking silly and being imperfect! We were having lots of fun, but there were some other reasons that made things difficult... We wish we could do it again, but I think we're happy doing live streams here and there together on YouTube the most for now! We just wish we could do it everyday!! 😭💕 Maybe one day... We'll just have to keep at things! ✨

We've been live streaming regularly to irregularly for quite a while, and it's something we find really fun! We're able to connect with you and so many other people from around the world with lots of different life experiences and personalities, so it's really exciting to us! We sometimes get told that we should give up or stop what we've been doing because we've already been at it for so long, but we still have lots of goals and dreams and things we haven't been able to accomplish! Most of all, it's something that's still really fun and filled with passion for us! So we don't ever want to quit. Not right now and not for the foreseeable future! 😆💗