Month: April 2021

Hosting a podcast or a live talk show is something I have a bit of experience with and honestly, the live element is probably the most exciting part for me! I’ve hosted TV shows, live stages, interviewed a bunch of people in a live environment, and been a part of a number of podcasts. With all this, I have developed some hosting tips and experience that I think will help make your life easier when it comes to doing it yourself!

Research!

This is probably one of the biggest elements a lot of people tend to skip and the thing that can make your life easier! The first thing I like to know if I have a guest is what are the key points they’re going to be discussing? By this, I mean what are you talking to them about. In my case, a lot of the time I was talking to game developers about a game that had either just come out or was set to be released so. So, key points there would be the name of the game, its release date, the platforms it’s releasing on, etc. There would also be other larger themes like a specific gameplay mechanic or theme they wish to highlight. Ideally, I’d find all this out long before the interview took place over emails with the person or a PR representative. Be sure to ask for this information, however, as it’s going to inform the run of show, something we’re going to discuss later in these hosting tips!

If the subject you’re going to be discussing is a piece of media, my hosting tip would be to make sure you consume that media! As I said, a lot of my guests were game developers so, ideally, make sure you play the game before you talk to the developer! Or you know, watch the film, listen to the album, read the book, etc. If you can’t, for whatever reason (it’s not released yet, it’s not even finished, etc) then be sure to tailor your interview to that and ask the appropriate questions based on your genre knowledge. Now, you won’t always have that depth of knowledge already on the subject you’re discussing but this is something you can research as well so you are at least grounded in the terminology you’re going to need to conduct your interview.

This, to me, is a key point because one of the two main jobs I believe you have as an interviewer is to inform the audience about the subject your interviewee is discussing. Most of the time, the person you are interviewing is perfectly capable of doing that themselves, but I believe when you’re dealing with a complicated subject it can be important for you to break down the answers people give. A classic example would be to say “So, you’re saying..” and quickly summarise what they’ve just said. I wouldn’t, however, do only that, try to say that and at least ask another question in relation to that, saving you from repeating the same point for those who did understand the answer given. Also, again, your own depth of knowledge is what is going to mean you knowing when something might be complicated and require that kind of explanation.

Run of show

The run of show is one of the most important documents you can get and something I advise you make use of in these hosting tips! If you’re working with a producer, they may make this for you but if you’re pulling double duty you really should make one for yourself! The run of show is essentially a long list with some expanded details. Not only the interviewees’ name and social handles/websites want to go in there but so do the key points you’re going to want to hit. Another key thing you’ll want to have in here is timings.

So, for example, when I would host the Indie[dot]XSplit showcase stage at places like PAX we would have multiple guests on over the course of a day to discuss their different games. Everything would be timed out as we are only allowed in the convention center halls for a set time and the guests were also showing their games on other stages and at their own booths. Knowing how long your guest is booked to be there is important because you have to make sure everything sticks to these times, not only for your own show but as a courtesy to the guest. They don’t want to be late for everything they have to do that day because you let the interview run over.

One hosting tip that can be useful, if you’re working with a producer, is to have them display some of this information, as well as a clock, using XSplit Broadcasters projector mode. This is something we used to do for our shows, just a simple scene with this information on “finish at 14:30” and a clock so I can see how close to that time I am. This is then projected to a monitor which is being displayed in front of me on the stage! It saves having too much info in the form of notes and keeps you able to stay ahead of time. It’s also a great way for the producer to communicate anything to you live during an interview!

Keep it positive and comfortable

So once you get to the day of your interview there are still a couple of hosting tips I can give you before you go live. Once your guest arrives, make sure you say hello to them and set the tone right from the start. You’re relaxed, positive and you know what’s going on and what’s going to be coming up in the interview. This is not only a professional courtesy but it will help someone who might be a little nervous getting interviewed in a live situation, possibly for the first time. Find out how they are doing, how the day is going, and double-check if there are any other key points than the ones you already have written down that they would like to make sure you hit in the interview.

Now when you get into the interview itself, you should introduce your guest so something to do before the interview is ask how to pronounce their name and what their pronouns are. You may think you know how to pronounce someone’s name, and you could well be right, but starting an interview off with the wrong name isn’t the best way to start. I’ve been guilty of saying a name wrong, I’ve even been guilty of the worse “introduce yourself”. This is, for you, easier, but for your interviewee, it’s putting them on the spot and not really giving them enough of a brief as to how much information they should be giving at that point. Always introduce the guest!

For me, keeping the tone conversational is the ideal way to go. I think an interview should feel a bit like a chat more than a prescribed set of questions going one after another. This, to me, means not holding yourself to where you think the interview should go, if everyone is having fun discussing something and it’s still serving the point of the interview, follow that! If something funny is said and your guests are having fun, stick with it! Don’t forget your key points, however, as you need to keep the conversation on track and hitting the key points we discussed earlier.

Keep the conversation going.

If the conversation does take too far of a shift away from the key points you’re there to discuss it’s your job to steer the conversation back. Ideally, you want to find a way to do that with what they’re saying but honestly, sometimes you just need to change the subject. Keeping that shift fun is important and it takes some experience but you’d be doing your interviewee a disservice by not doing that. Remember, everything you say should, ideally, be in service to what you’re there to discuss. Leave room for people to speak! Unless you’re telling an anecdote to relax the person you’re interviewing or to let them know “fun times are cool!”, it’s not your time to shine, it’s theirs!

It’s easy to try and fill time with a funny thing you want to say or going off on tangents purely because you’re enjoying them, but do remember why the person you’re talking to is there. And, why you’re there, which is as I said before to inform the audience but the second part of that is to get the best of the person you are interviewing. I truly believe that a big part of what an interviewer is there to do is show the person they are interviewing in their best light and leave the viewer/listener with the best impression possible.

One final, bonus hosting tip, from me, would be to always watch the people who inspire you or admire you in the interviewing field. To me, Graham Norton is one of the best in the world so I will always watch his chat show and listen to his radio show to get a sense of how he does what he does. Figure out what it is you really like about how they are interviewing people and then how you can incorporate that into your own personal style. I wouldn’t say it’s a great idea to emulate them but this kind of knowledge can help define your own style.

Team building is more important than ever with many working from home or in isolation. If you’ve ever been thinking about something else to do besides a Zoom happy hour we’re going to discuss how to put together an online tournament for team building. First things first, let’s discuss some tournament basics. There are basically four types of tournaments; Swiss, Round Robin, Free for All, and Elimination so let’s take a look at each!

Types of Tournaments

Swiss is generally reserved for tournaments like Chess or card games where opponents of similar skills are matched up against each other each round. This is great if you’re planning to do an office league or playing, for example, poker, you can control how long the tournament will take by setting the number of rounds, however, you may not get a clear winner unless you have a certain amount of rounds. Also, this system isn’t ideal if you don’t have many entrants in your tournament.

Round Robin has every player entered play against each other. This is a great format if you think you’ll have a handful of players. If you think you’ll have more than eight entrants, one of the other formats would work best as the number of rounds and length of the tournament can add up quite quickly.

Free for All is a format that can vary, but basically, it is focused on the number of points earned per round and is great for battle-royale style games like Apex Legends or Fortnite.

Finally, there’s elimination-style, which is the tournament format most are likely familiar with. This is a bracket-style tournament with a single elimination, which means one loss and you’re out. You could however do a double-elimination style which has an upper and a lower bracket. Once you’ve decided which kind of tournament you want to host, it’s time to use some tournament management software for your online team-building event.

Tournament Management Software

For this article we’re going to be looking at Challonge and Discord, both are free and give you a bunch of tools to work with. For Challonge you just need to fill out a few fields like the tournament format, the game being played, and the date/time. Make sure you put in detailed rules and instructions on how to report scores to prevent issues popping up down the line. This is especially important if people are new to tournaments and will save you a lot of time later on if there is some sort of dispute. Seriously, setting your rules is an important step to keep everything fair and most importantly, fun!

With Challonge you can opt to create a signup page people can use to fill in their details, or enter in the participants manually later yourself. One important thing when creating a tournament signup page is to create a form to collect important registration information like in-game name, Discord number, and the participants’ email address.

Next, we recommend setting up a Discord server to facilitate setting up matches easily and for the people taking part to report their results. You’ll only need a general text chat for this and you can set up roles if you will have people helping you run the tournament. You can also set up voice channels for your contestants if they’re playing a team-based game and will need to communicate. This is also useful as you will be able to quickly dip into a team’s voice channel if you need to tell them something important during the online team-building tournament. Once you’ve configured everything simply create an invite to the server and send it out to the participants and they’ll be able to download the Discord client and get going!

Running the Online Team Building Tournament

Running the tournament itself is pretty straightforward! On tournament day make sure your participants have checked in, they can do this just by dropping a message in Discord. This is useful as both you and they will know they’re ready to go! Next, you need to generate the bracket, which can be easily created on Challonge like we discussed earlier and will easily map out each round until the final. Once you’ve done that it will generate a link that you can drop in the Discord general chat for everyone to see who they are up against! You participants can post screenshots of their match results inside Discord and you just need to sit back and process the results to advance the bracket.

Live Streaming

Playing with co-worders is fun and all, but it’s even better if everyone can watch along and root for their fellow co-workers! Live streaming a tournament is easy depending on the game. If you’re playing any games that have a lobby or spectator mode then all you need to do is host the match, use XSplit Broadcaster and stream the gameplay from your online team building event. You can even use a text source and color matte sources to add some players’ names and scores.

If you have some co-workers willing to do some commentary, you can create a voice channel in Discord and let them spectate and commentate over the gameplay by using XSplit Broadcasters virtual camera as a video source in Discord. This is easily done by just setting your camera source in Discord to be XSplit Broadcaster when you’re setting up a video call to them.

Picking the Game

One subject we’ve danced around is what game you should pick for your tournament. Well, first you need to know what your co-workers like to play, although to be honest it can sometimes be hard to find fellow gamers in your company! If your co-workers don’t play too many games it’s good to pick team games or easier games to grasp quickly and get playing like Overwatch or Street Fighter. If you don’t think your co-workers have a gaming PC or console then it’s good to go for free to play games or mobile games like chess or PUBG. If you’re planning to stream the matches it’s best to pick a game that has a spectator mode built-in like DOTA 2 or Mobile Legends.

That’s about all you need to know to get started with hosting a tournament within your organization or friendship group! I do have one bonus tip, though! Be sure to structure your tournament in a way so you can finish the whole thing in about three to four hours. You can do this by limiting entrants or picking a format with a set number of rounds like Swiss. The main thing, however, is to have fun and you’ll not only make a fun time for the people in the online team-building tournament but you’ll put on a fun show for everyone watching on the live stream!

Streaming can be an expensive hobby, but it doesn’t have to be! From using your mobile device as a webcam, overlays, ditching capture cards, and more free live streaming tools in one article! You can’t say we don’t spoil you!

Webcam

Instead of buying a webcam, just use the best camera you probably already have, your smartphone! Download XSplit VCam on your PC and XSplit Connect: Webcam on your phone. As long as your phone is connected via wifi you can connect it to XSplit VCam. In VCam you can remove or replace the background, then just add it as a source in XSplit Broadcaster which can also be used for free! Now you have a high-quality webcam and didn’t have to spend anything, you can even adjust the bitrate and switch between cameras in VCam.

Music

The streaming community has recently had to deal with the acronym combo of the RIAA and the DMCA, basically, copyright is something to take extra seriously when you stream, lest you have your channel banned or worse! So it’s good practice to get stream safe music and thankfully there’s now a good amount of free streaming tools here. On the one hand, you have streambeats, by the stream doctor, Harris Heller. This is available on all platforms and has a ton of free tracks and genres. Simply find the playlists on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you find music and just let the music play!

Alternatively, you can dip into the free music that’s provided on your platform. Both Facebook and YouTube offer extensive libraries of free music that you can use for your streams. I personally find it funny when I stumble on a YouTube video that uses the same tracks that I do, it’s always a weird moment. Like a flashback to the editing process and in that moment myself and the video creator are connected, a whole army of us out there trying to avoid a DMCA but keep the tunes good.

Ditch the Capture Cards

“Capture cards are great and pretty much required for doing a two PC streaming setup, right?” I’m here to answer that question with a solid “NOPE!”. As long as your PCs are both on the same network you can use a protocol known as NDI to send Full HD 60FPS videos from one PC to another with minimal latency. How’s that for a free streaming tool? Simply install XSplit Broadcaster on your “gaming” PC, capture your desktop or gameplay, set your resolution and frame rate, then send out NDI. On your streaming PC, all you need to do is add the NDI source and you’re ready to go! Now, this uses a lot of bandwidth so make sure you don’t have too much traffic going through your router. Also, I must stress, use a wired connection for all of this!

Overlays and everything else

Are you looking to start streaming games and you want everything to be both free AND easy? Well, give Gamecaster a shot! They have free overlays and you can start streaming in a matter of clicks as well as control everything from inside your game! There’s a wide variety of different overlays included with Gamecaster to suit whatever game you’re playing as well as alerts, all easy to set up and integrated on whatever platform you’re streaming to!

Automation

Automation is probably the best way you can simplify your streaming life! Setting up a chatbot is free and easy, there are tons of great options like Moobot and Nightbot. Personally, I prefer Nightbot, it doesn’t have the flashy UI of Moobot but you get many more tools in the free version, which when we’re discussing free streaming tools is pretty important! You have your standard lists of banned words and commands to trigger messages in the chat, but you can also set up timers to post things like your socials or streaming schedule. You can also reward loyal viewers with giveaways as well!

Speaking of schedules, many social media accounts will let you schedule your posts in advance like Twitter or the Creator Studio for Facebook and Instagram. So, rather than doing an ad hoc tweet when you go live, schedule them in advance! Not only does this take some pressure off it also just saves you having to remember to do it in your go-live checklist!

Clips and Highlights

The hardest part of the streaming grind is getting an audience. It’s quite hard to get people to find you and follow you, so in the beginning, you need to be a content factory. This means taking clips and highlights of your streams and posting them everywhere! But what’s one to do without editing software? There has some be a free streaming tool for that, right? Well if you’re streaming to Twitch they give you an editor for free! Aside from being able to download your clips, you can also use the highlight tool to cut segments from your stream and download it for upload to YouTube, Twitter, or wherever.

It’s a pretty basic cutting tool, but quite handy nonetheless, and remember to level up your thumbnails and clickbait game, something we discussed here! Last but not least, don’t forget the best creative resource, yourself! It doesn’t take any budget to entertain people, you just need to find what niche or creative outlet works best for you!

As you can see there are plenty of ways to get your streams up to the standard you’re after without spending a lot of money! As we always say, the content is the most important thing so be sure to focus on that first and add production values second!

Making a decision about the best places to stream games can be overwhelming. There are a huge number of streaming platforms, with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. While the best way to find a platform that suits is to try them out, it helps if the choices can be narrowed down a bit first. So, let’s get narrowing.

Going for community

While almost everyone on these sites is a gaming fan, different platforms can have a different feel to them. For example, major streaming site Twitch is probably the service most people associate with game streaming, but there are a lot of options.

The Twitch community has created a host of unique live streaming events, including Twitch Plays Pokémon – a crowdsourced Pokémon video game using commands sent by users through the channel’s chat room; and last year’s nostalgic Bob Ross marathon.

Amazon-owned Twitch is widely considered one of the best places to stream games, where you can watch your favorite gamers stream their games, and interact with them on a real-time basis. The site also contains a lot of different gaming communities that have regular viewers, making it a good place to build friendships with people from all over the world.

Follow the money?

In addition to Twitch, two other big streaming sites are YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming, which last year merged with Microsoft streaming site Mixer and sees these companies making an even bigger play to be one of the best places to stream games.

Facebook requires a high level of followers (10,000) before you can start monetizing. And that has to be as a single page, not a profile, which is a harder barrier to reach. Compare this with just 50 followers needed to start monetizing on Twitch.

With YouTube Gaming, you can live stream directly using the same software that you use for Twitch. However, while YouTube is often considered nearly as good as Twitch, its main focus is not purely on gaming. However, it is worth noting that a lot of the largest creators on YouTube do have a gaming element to their content. Do remember that monetizing on YouTube also requires a lot of followers.

That said, YouTube Gaming is both simple and easy to use, and it also provides excellent quality and features that make transcoding easier. One suggestion for those who want to monetize is to stream to Twitch, and then post highlights of your streams to YouTube or Facebook. It’s also worth noting that both of these sites are investing heavily in becoming the best places to stream games so these monetization goalposts are always going to be changing!

Even more options

Popular with Asian users is Bigo Live, which is offered in around 150 countries worldwide. The site uses Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality to help deliver its streaming services. Bigo supports live game streaming but also features a wide number of other options such as fan events.

Those who are more interested in shooting videos with their smartphones could consider Instagram Live. Instagram Live has become more and more popular but is currently only available via the smartphone app unless you happen to read this article from us that runs down how to stream from your PC to Instagram which could make it one of the best places to stream games if you have a large audience there or are looking to build one.

There is also Caffeine.tv, which offers decreased lag times and the ability to host your own sports broadcast, as well as a unique monetization pathway that involves asking viewers to purchase digital items for your stream. These innovations, however, as with many places, are becoming more common elsewhere as time goes on.

GosuGamers is another up-and-coming game streaming site. It is very popular with the esports scene and boasts a wide range of games. At the moment, monetization is mostly limited to winning tournaments and challenges though – so this site is worth considering if you are really into competitive esports.

If you’re hoping to stream your gaming, there are now a huge number of places to do this. But the great news is that XSplit Broadcaster works with all of them – making it easy to try out any number of sites to find the best game streaming platform for you!

Sometimes when you’re producing a live stream, people want you to stream to every platform at once. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, some random server. “No problem!” you say, “I’ll get a restreaming server with custom RTMP access!” and it’s all going great until you go to set up the Instagram stream. “How do I…where? How? Who?” Well, fear not because right here we’re going to discuss how you can stream to Instagram from your PC!

“Why can’t I just stream directly to Instagram like other services?” is a perfectly reasonable question you might ask yourself. Well, because they want you to use their phone app and unless you’re a celebrity, you probably don’t have access to the RTMP or stream key you’ll need to broadcast to your page. For this, we will have to go the third-party route! There are a number of services out there and some of them are paid, but the easiest I’ve found is with yellowduck.tv

Setup

Before we go into how to set up Yellowduck to stream to Instagram from your PC, we’ll need to do some configuration with XSplit Broadcaster first. The first thing you’ll want to do is set your resolution to 720×1080 as this is the preferred resolution for Instagram, the recommended FPS is 30. You can do this by..

Clicking the Resolution Drop Down Menu in the Top Right > Resolution > Add Resolution > Custom Resolution > Input 720×1080.

In the same drop down menu > Frame Rate > 30FPS.

Now you’ll have to set up your sources to accommodate this resolution via cropping, which is easily done by holding the CTRL key after selecting the source in your main window. If you are still planning to produce 16:9 content you can try rotating it, but you may want to try laying it out with borders since most people are viewing Instagram in portrait mode.

Yellowduck Setup

Now that you have your production configured let’s get the stream output setup! First, download the Yellowduck client and install it, it will ask you to log in to your Instagram account and then generate a stream key. Don’t do that just yet as we have a few bits to do in XSplit Broadcaster first then we will come back to it! We will need to create a custom RTMP output in XSplit Broadcaster and set the bitrate for the video and audio.

Click the Broadcast drop down menu > Set Up New Output > Find More Outputs > Search and Install Custom RTMP > Select Custom RTMP from the Setup New Output menu.

Here you can name the Output Instagram or whatever works for you! On codec select NVENC h.2624 if you have an NVIDIA graphics card that supports it, if not x264. For video, the Bitrate limit is currently 2000 and for audio, under Audio Encoding, set the bitrate to 128.

Now, in the Yellowduck client click generate stream key as you were prompted to do when logging in, which will now give you the RTMP URL and Stream Key which you’ll paste into their respective boxes in XSplit Broadcaster. After this, click “okay” and you’re ready to stream to Instagram from your PC!

Conclusions

Since this is quite a unique setup for streaming to a platform, you’ll likely need to have a dedicated encoder, like a separate instance of XSplit Broadcaster for broadcasting content to Instagram, so be sure to factor this into any costs you may have with your multi-stream production. Also, be sure to note that this is more of a workaround until Instagram decides to possibly make live streaming from a PC officially supported!