Category: Content Creation

If you have decided to live stream, you want to choose a live streaming platform that will give you the best exposure. Some streaming platforms are focused on a particular niche such as gaming, and it can be hard to gain an audience on such a site if you’re planning to do archery tutorials. In this article, we’ll take a look at a few different use cases for live streaming and recommend the best live streaming service.

Business Presentations

If you’re looking to do business presentations and your co-workers are spread around the world, then you’ll need to use a platform that can restrict access to the live stream. A YouTube Live Stream would be the best solution for this, as it offers a variety of controls for privacy.

You will need to use the classic YouTube studio and create a new live stream event. When you are setting up your live stream event, make your event private in the drop-down menu. Click on the share button and invite the people you wish to view your live stream presentation via email.

If your company uses Google to manage email accounts, YouTube live streaming has an additional feature to share the live streaming with everyone in your organization. This is useful for company-wide presentations with a lot of employees.

A Facebook live stream is another option if your company has a page. If you gain admin rights to a company page you can broadcast directly to that page using your own Facebook account. However you will not be able to restrict this page to only employees, so this is not recommended for internal presentations.

Vlogging

If you’re looking to connect with your fans or build a community, using a live video streaming site is one of the best ways to interact. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have live streaming built into their mobile apps and websites, so you can start a stream anywhere you have an internet connection.

If you’re looking to monetize your vlogs, then Twitch and YouTube offer a variety of tools. One of the largest communities on Twitch is the just chatting section, which is meant for personal vlogs. Twitch live streams offer a variety of ways to monetize your content via the affiliates program. Once you’ve reached a certain level of viewership, you can become an affiliate which lets you receive paid subscriptions for your channel. These subscriptions can unlock badges and chat emoticons for your subscribers. The only problem with Twitch is that it’s discovery tools make it difficult for new broadcasters on the platform and you will have to rely on other social media to grow your audience.

A YouTube live stream is my recommendation for live vlogs. YouTube offers all the same monetization options as Twitch, but joining their partner program has a bit more strict requirements. YouTube has the added benefit of discoverability as long as you do proper SEO on your live stream titles and thumbnails. If you plan on doing VOD content in addition to your YouTube live stream, you’ll create a great funnel to amass subscribers to turn into followers on your other social media accounts.

Gaming

The undisputed king of gaming live streams is Twitch. Twitch’s browse features are entirely designed around finding streams of the games you are interested in watching. If you are able to join Twitch’s partner program you gain access to a variety of monetization tools from bits, subscriptions, subscriber-only streams and sponsorship opportunities via bounty boards. Twitch partners are also regularly promoted on the home page, which opens up more opportunities to expand your audience. Twitch partners also gain access to stream transcoding, so that viewers with poor internet connections can still watch your broadcast.

Competition is fierce on Twitch and some games, like Fortnite, have such an abundance of streamers that it can be hard to grow or even get viewers. Mixer is a great alternative for people who are just starting with live streaming. Mixer offers all the same features as Twitch, in addition to adding interactive elements with the spark system and using FTL broadcasting to allow mixer live streams to have little to no latency for the viewer.

YouTube and Facebook are also great sites for gaming live streams, with Facebook launching their new FB.GG portal and offering monetization options for gaming creators.

Commerce

A growing trend in live streaming is creating personal home shopping networks. You can amplify the sales of your goods by live-streaming the products being used. A good rule of thumb is to broadcast to the site where your social media following is strongest. If you are just starting out, Facebook and Instagram are the best platforms for live broadcasts. These sites will allow you to highlight your products in posts along with giving you boosting tools to promote your products to targeted audiences. You can also use direct messaging tools on these platforms to complete sales. You can also incorporate a chatbot or moderators to send viewers links to purchase the items you are showing.

Music or Live Performances

For music performances, you will need to be careful which platform you select if you will be performing copyrighted works. Sites like Twitch and YouTube will mute or restrict copyrighted material.

If you will be performing original material, then you can use any site, but it is recommended to use the site where you have the highest concentration of followers, such as Facebook or Twitter. One thing to note is that because many free platforms limit the bitrate for audio, you viewers may not receive the highest quality sound for your performance.

Educational

The best platform for educational content, like teaching guitar or vocal coaching, depends on if this will be paid or free lessons. If you will be doing free lessons, then using your social platform of choice works best. If you intend to charge for your classes, you will need a method of restricting access to your live broadcast. The best platform for this is YouTube live streaming, as it allows you to create private broadcasts where you can invite specific people.

Podcasts

If you have decided to take your podcasts online, YouTube is the best platform to show your live stream. YouTube will allow you to schedule your podcast so your viewers will know when to tune in and allows you privacy options if you wish for podcasts to be exclusive content for something like Patreon subscribers. You can also use YouTube to archive your podcasts or host highlights like the H3H3 podcast.

A good alternative is Twitch, which has a section dedicated to talk shows and podcasts. If you will be hosting a podcast with remote guests, Skype has some useful tools to improve the production of the show, which you can find out more about in this video.

How to broadcast to these platforms?

Broadcasting to these platforms is easy with XSplit Broadcaster! We’ve built custom plugins for all the popular streaming platforms. All you need to do is login to your account and our setup wizard will provide the best settings for your live stream! Focus on the content, not the setup.

We have an in-depth tutorial guide on our YouTube channel that can help you get started.

Ever fancy making your own gaming videos? Or editing videos for content? These days, you can log into social media and see multitudes of players broadcasting and uploading highlights of their gameplay. How do they do it? Let us teach you a simple way that you can create your own videos.

But wait, a disclaimer before anything! Setting up and prep time will take most of your time, but once you’re set and you’re happy with your setup then its a one-time thing (unless you want to switch things up in the set up). Here’s to setting expectations! Okay, let’s begin.

Choose a game

The initial step to creating awesome content is finding what it is that you’re interested in. If you’re not interested in it, then there’s no point in creating content for it; right?

So, what game are you interested in and would want to broadcast?
Will it be a mobile game, PC or console game?

This step is crucial before doing anything else, make sure that the game you choose to create content on is something that you truly enjoy playing – because the audience can easily tell that you’re merely creating this piece of video for the heck of it. There’s no use of creating content about games that you don’t really care about. Or playing a game for the only reason that it’s mainstream and it can incur views eventually. Pick something that you can play for long hours and truly enjoy the experience. Your future gameplay viewers, potential audiences and future self will thank you for it.

Choose a recording or broadcasting software

Depending on what kind of game or content you’ll be creating, there’ll be some add-ons or accessories that you’ll need to record game footage. If you’ll be creating content on console games, you might need a capture card to get footage on the gameplay and connect it to your software, for XSplit Broadcaster – you can check out the list of compatible capture cards here or if you’re using Gamecaster, check this out. If you have your game on the PC or laptop itself, then it’s only a matter of preparing the scenes. Here is a detailed guide on scenes, once done with setting up the scenes then we can move to the next step. For those looking into creating and editing game highlights after streaming, we highly recommend choosing a software that can simultaneously do local recording whilst broadcasting – you’ll know why in a bit.

Do you need a facecam?

No really, do you need one? For beginner content creators, having a face-camera or webcam might not be a priority on your streams. It’s good to have it eventually so that your audience can see your face and expression during a gameplay session, but as beginners – this can be optional. If you’re at a phase where you feel that adding a facecam is necessary for your set up, you can refer to this blog by our buddy Luis as a guide on how to choose your first face cam. Optimizing your webcam input is also easy with XSplit, here.

Let’s talk about audio

Surely you’d like to add the audio from your game and add, maybe, a microphone for when you’ll be doing commentary on the game from time to time; right? Or for when you do add a Skype or Discord VoIP with your team. We have a few guides available for when you want to
set up the audio and how to configure your audio in XSplit Broadcaster, and the most notable audio feature has to be the multi track audio for those who’ll be editing their footage and would want separate audio tracks. Multi-track audio is most helpful when after streaming your game and you’d want to edit the footage and omit/edit/enhance the audio – you’ll be able to edit accordingly without the hassle of combined recordings.

This is also beneficial for content creators who listen to their music players during game plays and would want to re-upload these on other social platforms. This will surely aid in avoiding capturing or omitting copyrighted music on your video. Speaking of editing your footage and uploading on socials, nobody has time to watch 4-hour long gameplay – you might want to edit the game highlights and post this monumental gameplay instead.

From here, you’re pretty much set to start recording and broadcasting your gameplay. After the session, we’ll talk more on how to get your game highlights as fast and easy as possible.

So, you’re done with your game broadcast (taking note that you also have this on local recording file) and it took you more than 4-hours before ending a game stage. It was an awesome game and you’d like to highlight the parts where you made the winning move! Nobody has time to watch all 4-hours, here’s where we teach you on the easy and least tedious way of editing your highlight reel.

Edit game highlights for socials

Our newly-released XSplit Express Video Editor is perfect for this! Its main benefit is allowing many content creators to easily edit and upload game/stream highlight reels faster than most complicated video editing software used today.

Here’s a short clip on how you can use the XSplit Express Video Editor in creating your highlight reels:

If you have other questions about the XSplit Express Video Editor, you can check out our blogs, search for FAQs or chat with our 24/7 customer support.

Monetization – one of the primary reasons why people get into streaming in the first place. That’s the dream, after all, isn’t it? Being able to do something you love while making some money on the side is something a lot of streamers aspire for. But what does it take to get there?

You’re spoiled for choice when it comes to where to stream your content, but since Twitch is one of the bigger platforms right now, so let’s start there. After getting your stream setup ready and finding your audience and your voice, there are a number of ways you can make money as a Twitch streamer. Let’s go over some of the most popular ones, starting with the most basic ones and going into some that are a little more creative.

1. Twitch Donations

Donations are what they sound like – some money your viewers decide to give you, usually in exchange for an animated alert or a shout out. You can set this up via PayPal or any other payment method. With a third party service like Player.me, you can set up alerts and donation trackers to gamify your donation goals. Make it easy for your audience to give you some love by setting up a donation button on your Twitch page.

2. Being a Twitch Affiliate

To become a Twitch Affiliate, you’re going to have to satisfy a few criteria first.

• 500 minutes or more of stream time in the last 30 days
• An average of 3 or more simultaneous viewers in the last 30 days
• Have at least 50 followers
• Broadcast 7 unique days in the last 30 days

Sure it sounds simple enough, but it takes quite a bit of dedication and you’ll have to stand out in a sea of your fellow streamers all vying for that precious Affiliate status. Here’s what you get with the Affiliate status:

• The Subscribe button becomes available for your viewers. A new affiliate can make up to 50% of each subscription cost.
• You can be given Bits. Bits are essentially a virtual currency that your viewers can buy and give out to their favorite streamers. Twitch pays you $0.01 per Bit you’re given.
• You can make money off any game sales done through your stream, like an affiliate program. So if you’ve got a good following, might be a good idea to play a highly sought after game. Affiliates earn a 5% commission off every sale.

3. Being a Twitch Partner

A Twitch Partner is like a Super Saiyan version of a Twitch Affiliate, meaning you get all the perks for being an Affiliate alongside some special perks.

To become a Twitch Partner, you’ll need to satisfy the following criteria:

• Stream for at least 25 hours in the last 30 days
• Broadcast 12 unique days in the last 30 days
• Have an average 75 viewers for the last 30 days

Besides getting everything an Affiliate gets, Partners get access to ads. As a Partner, you have control of the frequency of displaying the ads. You’d get paid a flat rate for every 1,000 impressions.

Be careful about putting out too many ads, though, because your viewers might not like that too much.

4. Sponsorships

When you get popular enough, you have the opportunity to use your infamy to get brands to notice you. Popular streamers can become very good brand ambassadors, especially if your followers share a lot of overlap with the target demographics of some brands.

Twitch allows sponsored content. Just make sure you’re honest with your viewers that they’re watching a sponsored stream – it’s good to keep a good relationship with your community.

5. Patreon

You can customize your Twitch page to include all kinds of links and content. You can put in all your sponsorships, links to your social media, or even your website if you have one. That’s the perfect place for you to link to your Patreon.

A Patreon page is essentially another way for your viewers to support you. They can pick from different tiers with corresponding rewards. Make sure to make it worthwhile for your Patreon supporters by offering exclusive content, which can range anywhere from special bonus footage from your streams to exclusive streams just for them. Make them feel special!

And there you have it – 5 income sources from being a Twitch streamer. Just remember – it takes charisma, charm, talent, and dedication. Good luck and happy streaming!

Customize your streaming checklist

Starting a stream session can be daunting, frustrating even when you forget to check your audio prior to going live or if your presentation/scenes are all set – or if you suddenly deleted your chats!

Phew! Hold on, stop for a moment and take a breather. Don’t fret, here’s a customizable checklist that you can use prior to going live. Note that this is a sample and you can tweak the list according to your needs.

Here it goes…

Check your presentation

Are the scenes set up according to your liking?
Is your chat/comments section added on the scene?
Is the game being captured nicely on screen?

Check your audio

Is your system sound audio loud enough for the stream?
Is your microphone connected properly?
Is there an audio feedback loop?

Do a stream test

Check your bandwidth health

Update your dashboard

Make sure to update your stream title with something catchy or clickbait-y to catch the attention of your loyal and potential audiences or make them curious enough to click on your stream and watch it, don’t forget to include the name of the game that you’re playing to entice other similar players into watching your stream.

If your platforms enable you to customize your stream page or post, create consistent imagery that can attract current and potential viewers into staying and watch your stream. Make it interesting!

Use your socials

Surely, you’d have your social platforms – and it pays to have the same alias/nickname/game handle or username across social media so that people can easily search for you and your content. Your online name/alias can also serve as your branding and will help in the future if you decide to go pro. Make sure that your streamer name can be easily spelled and memorable, it adds to the branding that we’ll talk about in another blog.

Stick to a schedule

Your biggest fans aka friends and family – aren’t always online to watch your streams. It helps to have a schedule so that people will know when they can expect you to stream your content. It also creates commitment on your part to stick with a time and day to go live.

Don’t forget to share your schedule on your socials not limited to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – share it on Reddit, post it in gaming forums and/or your Discord server.

Enjoy!

In case if you’re streaming for an extended session, make sure to schedule bio-breaks and have some snacks and drinks in between. The purpose of streaming is to have fun and not restrict you from the things that you need to do to take care of yourself too.

If you’re still new to the world of streaming, we suggest you check out our XSplit Academy for some useful streaming tips!

So, you’re streaming on insert your platform here with insert awesome, highly anticipated trending game of the year here but you just can’t get the setup right. Here are the top 5 things that you should check to avoid streaming oopsies.

Here is a short and sweet list on what to check out before starting your stream.

Windows updates and drivers

Don’t you just hate it when a Windows prompt pops up and instructs you to update? Or worse, updates and requests for a restart. Exactly. Before anything else, check if the drivers and Windows are up-to-date to avoid untimely disruption to your streaming session.

Go to Start > Settings > Windows Settings > Update and Security > Windows Update.

If there are pending updates available, take your time in installing these prior to setting up your stream. And to avoid disruption due to update prompts, you can also change your laptop or PCs update active hours so that the device won’t automatically restart during the set active hours. Plus, the device won’t restart without checking if you’re still using it. Great trick, yeah?

Another thing, aside from making sure that Windows is updated, make sure that your drivers’ update (capture card and/or streaming software) does not have any compatibility issues with the latest Windows. You know that this can happen sometimes.

Optimizing scenes

Do you notice a slight delay when switching scenes? This usually happens when you have large videos or image files on the scene and it takes a bit of time loading the asset. So, what do you do to avoid this? The simplest way to solve this is to right-click the file source menu and click on ‘keep source on memory’. This helps the scene avoid loading and re-loading the video or image files every time you switch scenes. If you have time to convert the files, it is also recommended to compress sources file sizes by encoding them as mp4s or webms instead of avi or mov.

PC games capture

Most of the time, capturing PC games for streaming can easily be achieved with automatic game source detection, but sometimes this feature can also fail. If the auto game source fails to capture your game, what do you do?

The next step is to check if there are other running programs interfering with XSplit’s game capture, some of these programs may include NVIDIA ShadowPlay and AMD’s Radeon ReLive; if this type of program is running, close the program and see if the game is now detected in XSplit’s game capture.

Audio Echo

Audio is one of the most common technical issues encountered during a stream. Whether you experience – looping audio, no audio or audio echo; troubleshooting is easy when you use this guide:

If you opened your stream on a browser with the intention of monitoring it, check if you’re able to mute the audio. If an echo can still be heard, check your microphone settings – make sure that the ‘listen to device’ is turned off.

Go to Start -> Settings -> Windows Setting -> System -> Sound -> Input (Microphone) -> Device Properties -> Related Settings -> Additional device settings -> Listen -> Uncheck ‘listen to device’.

Dropped frames or stream lag

Now, dropped frames and a laggy stream is not fun to watch – at all. This can happen due to a multitude of things, one can be that you’re uploading a large file online and it’s messing with your stream bandwidth. So, make sure that you’re not uploading or downloading files during a streaming session; you can do that on a later time. If you’re not uploading nor downloading files through your connection and still experience dropped frames, check with your internet service provider if you have (at least) a minimum bandwidth capacity for decent streaming (usually between 1-5mbps, depends on what you’re streaming).

Okay, if the issue is indeed your internet connection and you’re aware that the bandwidth can fluctuate at times; the best thing to do is set ‘adaptive bitrate’. You can find this in the additional encoding options menu in the broadcast settings window. If you still see dropped frames after all these, then it’s best to lower the bitrate into a workable value for the stream to run smoothly (you can also do the adjustment even when your stream is live) – this one can be a trial and error so do have patience until you get the optimum combo for your set up.

Hope these help you out on your stream! If you have other questions, you can check out our blogs, search for FAQs or chat with our 24/7 customer support.

Do you want to have a stream like Myth, Ninja or Pokimane, but just don’t have thousands to sink into a streaming setup? Never fear! Your friends at XSplit are here to show you how to put together an amazing looking stream on a budget!

First let’s get some pesky prerequisites out of the way. You will need a PC with at least a quad core i7 processor or a NVIDIA 700 series or equivalent GPU. You will also need at least 10mbps upload if you wish to stream in HD. You’ll also need a microphone and a webcam. If you’re just starting out, use whatever is available such as built in webcams and microphones in gaming headsets and webcams.

Next let’s look at in-game settings for Fortnite. While the obvious choice would be to go for the highest graphic settings, you actually want settings that will open up CPU or GPU resources to encode your stream. Many pros have their settings the lowest level except for view distance and textures. Make sure the game is set to fullscreen and keep the resolution the same as your monitor’s recommend resolution. Be sure to also turn on the streamer mode setting to prevent stream sniping. Enabling push to talk is also useful if you don’t want your squad to hear you talking to your viewers.

Now let’s set up your stream. You can use XSplit Broadcaster to stream in HD for free, just click on the link in the description to download! In XSplit, set your resolution and frame rate to 720p and 30fps, as this will give you a good baseline stream. You can capture Fortnite in XSplit by using the auto detect source. If you have a webcam connected you can add it as a video device. You can access the audio settings here to make sure you’ve select the correct microphone device.

In the broadcast menu, add the output for whichever streaming platform you use and login to your account. You may be prompted to run a wizard, but skip this for now. The first setting is codec, while x264 is recommended to get the best streaming quality, if you are using an older or limited CPU it is recommended to use GPU hardware codecs. AMD and NVIDIA have their respective hardware codecs VCE and NVENC.

The next setting is bitrate and is probably the most important. The higher you can set the bitrate, the better quality your video and audio will be. Your bitrate is only limited by your upload bandwidth and by the platform you are broadcasting to, so set it as high as possible. Make sure to set a stream delay if you’d like to limit stream sniping, especially if you’re playing in an online tournament.

Not that you’ve configured your stream setting, start your first broadcast and play a game of Fortnite. Take note of your CPU and GPU usage in XSplit. If your usage is low you can start raising your resolution and frame rate. In time you’ll find the sweet spot that gives you the highest quality stream, without sacrificing game performance.

Next you’ll want to add some overlays and alerts to your stream. Our good friends at Player.me offer free overlays and have designed a variety of overlays specifically for Fortnite. Adding Player.me overlays to XSplit is simple, just copy and paste the overlay URL into XSplit. If you enable the XSplit integration in Player.me, your gamesource and webcam will automatically be positioned.

Now you should have a pretty sleek looking stream and well be equipped to start your journey to become a professional Fortnite broadcaster. If you’re just starting out it is important create and keep a streaming schedule. You can use XSplit’s Express Video editor to make clips to promote your stream on social media. Finally it is recommended to use one of the many free chat bots to help moderate your chat.

We’ll have a video coming in the near future with even more tips to improve your Fortnite streams! Please leave any questions in the comments and we’ll answer ASAP! Be sure to follow us on social media for advice and tips!

Today we want to take a look at the most popular games being streamed across all platforms as of August-September 2018.

Fortnite

Unsurprisingly, at the time of writing, Fortnite from Epic Games is being streamed by a ton of people. Fortnite streaming has been huge for a while now but it was really kicked in to a next level when pro player Ninja gained mainstream attention streaming the game with Drake on March 15th 2018.

playing fort nite with @ninja https://t.co/OSFbgcfzaZ

— Drizzy (@Drake) March 15, 2018

At one point the stream had more than 635,000 concurrent viewers, which set the record for a non-tournament stream. Fortnite has continued to gain popularity and we can’t see that changing any time soon!

League of Legends

League of Legends has been in the top spots for years with big tournaments happening seemingly every month. At the time of writing, LCK 2018 Summer is happening, the second split of the 2018 Season of League Champions Korea. Pulling in an average of 45,000 concurrent viewers this might not be the biggest tournament, for example the 2016 finals pulled in over 36 million unique viewers, it still shows the strength League of Legends has in the streaming charts.

Hearthstone

The first Blizzard game here but its popularity only seems to grow over time. Even out of tournament play, this game will stay lodged in a lot of sites top spots. 2017’s Hearthstone World Championships pulled in over 8 million total viewers with an average of 592,201 concurrent viewers.

World of Warcraft

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has been a staple in streaming for a while now but it’s not always as high as it is this month. We are currently headed towards a brand new expansion, Battle for Azeroth, which launches August 14th. Big channels known for MMO play have been playing the pre-expansion patches and showing off a lot of high level play.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

A surprise entry at the start of September is the PS4 exclusive, Spider-Man. Having launched only on September 7, 2018, it has quickly gathered 214K++ followers on Twitch, getting as high as 232K concurrent viewers. Big releases usually get a bit of hype at the start of its lifecycle, but considering that it’s a console-exclusive and that it’s a single player title, this is actually quite impressive.

These are just a few of biggest games streamed online! As a bonus tip, don’t feel you need to stream these to get noticed! Play what you love to play, as after all, if you’re not enjoying yourself, neither is your audience!