Streaming Guide

❦ First Published on

What I’ve learned from streaming, or broadcasting video on the internet, so far. An article-in-progress to remind and teach myself things I forget while sharing what I find and learn from others.

Speaker

Your personal voice. What interests you? Why broadcast? What is your intent? Remember moments together with distant friends? Find new friends? Share knowledge? Pay bills? Combining two things you are fairly good at. What do you genuinely enjoy and perhaps can talk about in depth?

  • Sound quality.
  • Schedule and consistency whenever possible.
  • Health and ergonomics.
    • Regular breaks, timers like pomodoro timer.
    • Drinking water.
    • Comfortable chair.
    • Standing table.
    • Excercise, regular walks, especially in forests if possible.
  • Focus on a game that you enjoy and that is not one of the most-played by others, at least in the beginning.
  • Off-stream content. Blog. Reddit posts. Sharing personal experience and expertise.
  • Branding, graphic and UI design, emotes, merchandise.

Audience

  • Who do you want to talk to? What do you want them think and feel when they visit your stream?
  • Moderation. Well-defined rules and code of conduct.
  • Chat attention and etiquette. Moderators. VIPs. Chat commands (!command). :emotes. Raids.

Technology

Hardware

  • PC
  • Mic
    • Mic position
  • Headphones
  • Camera
  • Green screen
  • Internet connectivity
  • Internet Service Provider
    • Cable
    • Wireless Internet Service Provider for rural
    • Starlink

Software & Services

  • Twitch - Creator Camp
    • Resolution & Bitrate - what should you use? Lower your bitrate to improve your stream stability.
    • Dropped frames? The most likely reasons are that your bit rate is too high or your internet connection has stability issues. See this and this post by Jim, the lead developer of OBS. If you are using Twitch, use TwitchTest to test and then choose servers with at least 80 quality (baseline) or above.
    • Affiliate
    • Partner
    • Channel Points
    • Overlays
    • Alerts
    • VODs
    • Category - The primary subject of your stream. Think of categories like the Table of Contents on a book. Usually the name of the game you are playing, or the thing you are primarily doing, like cooking, music, art, or just chatting. ¶ If are starting out and love a game that everyone else loves or that just came out and everyone else is playing few if any will find you because most will be watching others play it. Maybe wait until the game is not as popular any longer, or play another game you like that is more obscure.
    • Tags - Keywords to help others find your stream, like those on the index of a book. For example, you can use the ClosedCaptions keyword to indicate that you have closed captions enabled to help users who like streams with closed captions to find your stream when they filter by tags.
    • About page - Who are you, what do you like, what do you do, and so on.
    • Highlights - Consider add stream markers at any exciting points of your stream (they are an option on the Twitch Dashboard), and later use these to create short highlights that you can also export to YouTube and place in a Highlights playlist filtered by last-published.
    • Clips
    • Subscriptions
    • Follows
      • If you find you cannot follow a channel (nothing happens when you click the Follow button) it is probably because Twitch currently has a limit of 2000 follows, so if you follow more than 2000 people you won’t be able to follow any more before unfollowing some channels.
    • Donations
    • Charity
  • OBS Studio
  • Camo Studio to turn old phone into webcam
  • StreamElements, bits, timers, polls, variations for custom bit alerts
  • Better Points
  • Triggerfyre
  • Firebot
  • Multistreaming
  • vdo.ninja to bring live video from smartphone, remote computer, or friends into OBS.
  • YouTube
  • DMCA, copyright
  • Audio libraries
  • Avatars (vtubers)

Troubleshooting

Useful information found while troubleshooting stream stability issues with Microsoft Flight Simulator:

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