Streamers with jobs

MikeHaegaman wrote:

Anyone got tips for growing your chat or at least attracting an active chat audience?

Stream regularly and on a consistent schedule. Advertise to anyone that will listen. Engage on twitter and anywhere else you can.

A buddy of mine got his viewership up to 30-40 on the higher end nights through just sheer doggedness and consistency. Then he took two weeks off. He came back and he'd lost all but the most diehard of people and was back to an average of about 10. He abandoned ship on streaming not too long after that because it was just way too much work for the reward and it was affecting his real job.

Bigger streamers will note the same thing if you listen to them. Someone who averages 1200+ viewers for a long time can take vacation trip and come back to half that for most of their streams. A lot of people have extremely short attention spans.

As far as getting an active chat audience, that's just all in interacting with them. I know one person that kept post it notes next to his monitor early on to remind him of the twitch names of the more active chat people he saw so he could welcome them back if they did come back another time. He said just being able to show that you knew they'd been before and were back again seemed to make a big difference and kept people involved.

I think the most people I ever had watching was 12 or so when I was streaming a bit of Starcraft 2. I found it basically impossible to play the game and interact with chat at the same time, so I'd be mute for 20-45 minutes at a time and they were left to their own devices. The next time I streamed was at a wildly different time of day and none came back. A perfect example of what not to do

MikeHaegaman wrote:

Anyone got tips for growing your chat or at least attracting an active chat audience?

Like Thin J said, I think consistency is key, but I think playing similar games can also help. I've been watching a lot of EU4 streams lately, and I've noticed that there's quite a few people who seem fairly new, but still get 20+ viewers. You're probably not as likely to get that if you play something like FIFA, Madden or Overwatch, etc.

Yeah, that's what I figured. Working hard on the consistency end of it. Right now I play Skyrim Special Edition and Battlefield 1. A friend and I are also doing a horror series and we just finished Outlast yesterday, which is when we had the uptick in chatters.

b12n11w00t wrote:

Because of the way Jackbox works I had to quickly figure out streaming and preferably with a small response time. So I got on Beam and after a bit of fiddling got the OBS FTL executable and had a stream going fairly quickly, even used a virtual audio mixer to only output the game audio and not what I was hearing on discord.

Anyone in the know about this stuff understand why sometimes a person would be up to 15 seconds behind while everyone else is less than 3? I have 10mbps upload so I assumed I was okay there.

Oooh! Oooh! Pick me! Pick me!

So, first things first - Beam's FTL is AMAZING when you have it up and running. I've been streaming in FTL for almost a month now, and last night I had to go back to RTMP, and it's amazing how slow a 3+ second delay feels after having had 250ms.

That said, it looks like you were trying to stream on Monday night, and multiple Beam streamers I've spoken with all report that FTL was behaving poorly that night (it's why I was on RTMP the other night. FTL was dropping about 30% of my frames...).

So, it mostly sounds like you simply tried FTL on the wrong night. Whether they changed something in the code (FTL is still in beta, technically), or the ingests were just all super-busy or something else, I couldn't say.

The other possible issue is that Beam recently launched their 2.0 interface in the last. . . six weeks or so. There have been a few bugs with that for some viewers. Sometimes chat will disconnect and reconnect. Sometimes streamers will be several seconds behind, while others are following along just fine. Sometimes viewers (especially with FTL) will experience a slight audio/video desync.

There are typically a couple fixes for this.
1) Refresh. Oftentimes this will catch a viewer back up.
2) Disable Beam 2.0. Each viewer can change to using Beam 1.0 in their settings under "Account". It isn't officially recommended, but I think about 20% of my audience is using the legacy interface.
3) It's also possible this is an issue with your configuration for Beam. I could try to help you review your keyframes, bitrate, resolution, frames per second and etc if you wanted. (Rule of thumb, I think, is to stream at 720, 30fps, bitrate 3000, 3keyframes for FTL, and CBR. With RTMP I think keyframes can be dropped to 1. Tinker as you're comfortable with.)

Hope some of that helps.

(EDIT)
As a fellow Jackbox Beam streamer - it really IS a great platform for Jackbox games in general. Most of the games can handle the 2-3 second delay of Beam RTMP with no problem, but it's extra-amazing to play fast reaction games (like YDKJ) when FTL is on point.

I just wish they'd get Beam login assistance going the way they have Twitch logins (rumors were that this was coming last summer. I'm not sure if that fell through, is in the works, or what...)

MikeHaegaman wrote:

Yeah, that's what I figured. Working hard on the consistency end of it. Right now I play Skyrim Special Edition and Battlefield 1. A friend and I are also doing a horror series and we just finished Outlast yesterday, which is when we had the uptick in chatters.

I'll confirm consistency is one of the keys. It's my biggest personal stumbling block. I'd love to do a few hours 5+ days a week, but I can only do 3 nights a week. My growth and audience size reflect that pretty heavily.

Several friends have started streaming in the last 9+ months, and almost all of them have surpassed me in all the assorted metrics, because they can stream "every day". C'est la vie. Until someone puts a winning lottery ticket in my pocket I'll keep counting myself lucky to stream at all.

Beyond consistency/having a schedule - I'd say the next big tip is to be yourself. Don't chase games for views. Play what you like. Tell the jokes you wanna tell. The rest will sort itself out over time. There are plenty of plans for getting viewers quick "Stream the same game every day for to get a following, then switch to what you really want to play," or "Always stream new releases," or "Giveaways, man!"

But I feel like while those might be good for quick/cheap views - I'll take my small, but QUALITY audience over that every day.

wolfstar76 wrote:

Beam Stuff

Thanks for the info. I first streamed Sunday day and then later Sunday night. Then again last night. Each time there was always 1 person(out of 3-5 other people) that was around 10-15 seconds behind. The first time I streammed at 1080/60fps and a 3500 bitrate. I thought that might be the problem so I reduced it to the 720/30fps but at a bitrate of 2500. Do you think increasing to 3000 would be beneficial? I'm using almost completely default settings so my keyframe interval is at 0. What exaclty is that doing?

I'll adjust my settings, increase the bitrate to 3000 and keyframe to 3, but any information on the 'why' of it all would be cool. I still mostly plan to just use this for group jackbox sessions but the idea of streaming of streaming is cool, just not sure I'm prepared for the work that goes into it.

b12n11w00t wrote:
wolfstar76 wrote:

Beam Stuff

Thanks for the info. I first streamed Sunday day and then later Sunday night. Then again last night. Each time there was always 1 person(out of 3-5 other people) that was around 10-15 seconds behind. The first time I streammed at 1080/60fps and a 3500 bitrate. I thought that might be the problem so I reduced it to the 720/30fps but at a bitrate of 2500. Do you think increasing to 3000 would be beneficial? I'm using almost completely default settings so my keyframe interval is at 0. What exaclty is that doing?

I'll adjust my settings, increase the bitrate to 3000 and keyframe to 3, but any information on the 'why' of it all would be cool. I still mostly plan to just use this for group jackbox sessions but the idea of streaming of streaming is cool, just not sure I'm prepared for the work that goes into it.

I'm not 100% solid on how to do the math behind what's the optimal bitrate, but I'm on the official XSplit Beam Team, and for XSplit-based FTL, the settings I listed before are what we generally agree to be the "optimal basics".

The basic science breaks down to:

  • BITRATE - This is how much data you send to the site. Higher resolution or frames need more bitrate/bandwidth. There's an art to setting this, however, as setting it TOO high (at least in RTMP) also means more bits for your viewers to download. So, if you set your bitrate to 7500 (7.5Mbps out of your 10Mbps pipe), and someone only has download speeds of 5Mbps - they'll likely have issues with latency, delay, and more. I ~think~ FTL resolves some of this through its magic.
  • KEYFRAMES - We've all see youtube videos that get those square blurry artifact on them, right? Then suddenly thing "snap" back into place? As I understand it, when you start to watch streaming video, most of what you're streaming is what's "changed" from frame to frame. A keyframe then comes along every so often, and is a FULL frame - a chance to reset anything that's been drawn wrong.
  • CBR - Constant Bit Rate. Always sends at the bitrate you sent. The other option is VBR (variable bit rate). This can let your PC send less data if very little is changing on your screen (useful for people who do things like art/drawing games, less so for gaming).

I'm not going to profess to being the perfect expert here, so if someone else steps in with a correction - they're probably right.

wolfstar76 wrote:

I'll confirm consistency is one of the keys. It's my biggest personal stumbling block. I'd love to do a few hours 5+ days a week, but I can only do 3 nights a week. My growth and audience size reflect that pretty heavily.

Same here. Right now I stream on M/W/Sat. I could probably squeeze more and would love to do every night, but I also love my wife, haha.

wolfstar76 wrote:

Until someone puts a winning lottery ticket in my pocket I'll keep counting myself lucky to stream at all.

Basically. While I'd love for streaming to be a full-time gig, I actually have a full-time gig that I can't afford to lose.

wolfstar76 wrote:

Beyond consistency/having a schedule - I'd say the next big tip is to be yourself. Don't chase games for views. Play what you like. Tell the jokes you wanna tell. The rest will sort itself out over time.

I'm glad to hear that. I think one of the better ideas I had was to approach this from a "I just want to have fun" standpoint. I already play a few nights a week anyways, so one day I just said "Why don't I stream what I already play?"

Watching Touch the Skyrim on Polygon rekindled my interest in Skyrim since I never beat it originally. So right now that's is predominantly what I stream. Then I have a horror series with my friend that I had been wanting to do for a while but didn't have free time up until the beginning of this year. We're having fun with that.

So yeah, approaching it from a "play what interests me" standpoint is definitely the way to go.

Thanks for the advice. I think where I honestly struggle is getting it out in front of people social media wise.

MikeHaegaman wrote:

Thanks for the advice. I think where I honestly struggle is getting it out in front of people social media wise.

I can't find the blog post any more (thought I had it bookmarked, but. . . ahwell) - but I read a neat post not long ago that - when I applied it for a month or so - I found actually worked pretty well.

This particular tip was twitter-centric, but as that's my social media tool of choice, I was okay with that. In a nutshell, the blogger talked about making sure you tweet 3 - 5 times a day as a way to interact with your audience. And to have a basic structure to your tweet schedule.

Crazy talk, right? Streamers with Jobs don't have that kind of time to be on twitter all day!

However, Tweetdeck (tweetdeck.twitter.com) will let you schedule tweets to happen automatically throughout the day. So, if you spend 10 minutes in the morning (or at night the day before) composing a few tweets, you can be done for the day. That's step 1.

Step 2 is the structure. You'll really want to salt that to taste, but borrowing from your listed schedule, perhaps something like:

Monday - 8am "I'm playing {@game} tonight at {time} with {@otherpeople}. Be sure not to miss it because {fun thing/inside joke/giveaway}! {streamlink}"
Monday - noon Re-worded repeat of the same.
Monday 3:00 - "Remember, we're {repeat} tonight!"
Monday an hour before you stream: "Getting all set up for {@game}. What part are you excited to see?"

Tuesday would focus on talking about what you did the night before in the first half of the day. "Still laughing at stumbling off that cliff last night...."

The latter half of the day (time permitting) - talk about some gaming news item. "What do you think about this Nintendo Switch Left Controller issue? Have you encountered it?". If you have links to news articles or relevant youtube videos - use them.

Use #hashtags and @names where possible to get spotted by people keyword searching. Ask open questions so your community can interact and be involved.

Wednesday - Monday all over again

Thursday/Friday - Tuesday all over again. Ask about people's weekend plans. "What games are you spending your weekend with?"

Saturday - you guessed it. Monday/Wednesday again.

Sunday - Tuesday again.

I don't know that this will make you an overnight success, but it's a pretty low-effort way to engage with your community, get yourself out there, pick up a few easy-clicks related to what you're already doing, and keep your name front-of-mind for people watching/following you.

If people DO reply to your tweets, and you have twitter on your phone/desktop/browser and you can take a minute to reply (or at the VERY least "favorite/like" tweets - that's all the better. Streaming is interactive, maintaining that while you're not "on" helps a bunch.

Time permitting (yeah, right) you can expand that to other social media sites.

I'd recommend setting up a Discord server, and using that as a base of operations. Chat with your community about {whatever}. Make a player.me account and link it back to your streaming services. Make a Facebook page. Create a Steam Group and take advantage of the calendar feature there to make a pop-up to your fans for when your streams go live.

ALL of that takes time to maintain however. At this point I'm down to Twitter, Discord and MAYBE player.me. My Facebook, YouTube, and Steam group are ghost towns.

Good luck out there.

(EDIT)
Fixed formatting to demark my "variables"

Good Lord, that's a lot of info. Haha

All of this makes perfect sense. I had enough forethought to set up social media accounts as soon as I settled on a name, so luckily that part is done.

I feel like an old man (I'm only 27) because the idea of plugging things on social media constantly sounds unappealing. Lol. I feel even older because I have no idea what Discord or Player.me is at all, though I have heard of Discord at least.

That's solid Twitter advice though and if I really want to make a go of things, I need to embrace it.

Question about Discord:

If I primarily use Twitch right now for streaming (building a PC, so that may change soon) how does discord factor in as far as it being a chat client?

And one last question, while I'm able to do some research (slow work day):

Anyone use Beam?

I've been reading up on it and see great things about it. Next to no delay, a more active/interested userbase and less trolls/meme-spewing chatters (not that any chatters are my problem, I rarely get anyone at the moment).

Thinking about trying it out this weekend. Would love to hear other's thoughts on using that vs Twitch.

Discord:

Using their Streamkit, you can overlay a chatroom or voiceroom participants in your stream pretty easily. I like to use Discord because it unifies folks chatting in one place, if possible, though some folks still prefer to stick on the specific network.

Beam:

I use Restream.io to stream to YouTube, Twitch, Beam and Hitbox. I like Beam a lot, but I'm unsure if I'd use it as my sole platform if I had to choose just one.

While I like what beam does, I generally use it for the video portion of Restream users, and use the twitch chat. Beam chats (at least all of the ones I've been in), are almost uniformally dead.

Hey folks, I'll be streaming Hollow Knight tonight at 8pm ET over on my Twitch channel. I'm thinking of doing streams Sundays at 8 and so this will be an interesting test while promoting a game I'm having a really good time with.

MikeHaegaman wrote:

Question about Discord:

If I primarily use Twitch right now for streaming (building a PC, so that may change soon) how does discord factor in as far as it being a chat client?

I use Discord as a cross between Slack (a place for my community to have asynchronous conversations - a mini-social media site or modern-day forum), and TeamSpeak/Ventrillo (for voice chat during game nights).

I don't know that I'd be happy using it for a real-time chatroom, though as others have posted, that's apparently an option. If I were multi-site streaming, I'd consider it.

MikeHaegaman wrote:

And one last question, while I'm able to do some research (slow work day):

Anyone use Beam?

I do. Exclusively. Big fan, big supporter.

I've been reading up on it and see great things about it. Next to no delay, a more active/interested userbase and less trolls/meme-spewing chatters (not that any chatters are my problem, I rarely get anyone at the moment).

Thinking about trying it out this weekend. Would love to hear other's thoughts on using that vs Twitch.

The biggest benefits of beam - like the reduced delay for RTMP (or better still, FTL - but more on that in a moment) only really come from streaming directly to Beam. If you go through a restream service you have to use RTMP (which is what every other site uses, so no big deal), but that introduces some delay to the process that sort of defeats one of the best reasons to go with Beam in the first place.

Better still, if you stream to beam using the most recent version of XSplit, or their own variant of OBS - you can activate their Faster Than Light proprietary protocol that tops out at 250ms of delay. There are a couple catches to this. The biggest ones being that you need the specific software(s) listed above - and the fact that FTL is in beta.

I've been streaming in FTL for a month now that XSplit has support - and last week I couldn't FTL for a couple nights for some reason. A patch to XSplit on Friday resolved that. So, that's a small case of "buyer beware". For a new streamer, it might not be worth the added headache until this protocol is fully ironed out. But it IS getting constantly better and easier to use.

As for finding an audience there - I fully agree. The community is Beam is amazing. While no site is troll-free, the Beam community is very supportive and does a fair bit of self-policing. Trolls simply aren't welcome, and so they find easier sport (back on Twitch/Youtube).

However, Beam has a much smaller (but fast-growing!) pool for their audience to begin with. On the one hand, this can make it harder to get views. Some of the biggest streamers on Beam only get 25-30 simultaneous viewers. On the other hand, this is part of what keeps the audience such high-quality. Trolls love to hide in a crowd.

Ultimately, it's up to you and your own experience. Maybe neither Twitch nor Beam are right for you. Maybe Hitbox is. Or Youtube.

Try 'em all and see what works for you.

It doesn't seem like Twitch allows me to download my own videos. I'd like to edit the footage with my own software to create a highlights reel that I can then push to YouTube. I understand Twitch has tools to export to YouTube, but I'm not familiar with their tools and want greater control.

Does anyone know of any apps I can use to grab my broadcast? I know there are tools for YouTube but I'd rather not clog my video history there with Streams.

ccesarano wrote:

Does anyone know of any apps I can use to grab my broadcast? I know there are tools for YouTube but I'd rather not clog my video history there with Streams.

I'm not aware of any tools for extracting from Twitch, I'm afraid (aside from the YouTube Export).

However, OBS and XSplit have options to record locally when you stream. XSplit, in fact, can default to recording your video locally while you simultaneously stream.

There used to be TwitchDown, run by the NightDev guys (that make Nightbot). but according to their page:

....but with the rise of Twitch Clips, Oddshot, and most recently Twitch's first-party download solution (broadcasters can now download their content from the on-site video manager), there is little use for this service any longer (relative to the server costs associated with keeping it running). As a result, TwitchDown has been officially shut down as of November 1, 2016.

I haven't streamed in so long that I don't have any VODs available to test with, but the above suggests that you can download/export locally from your Twitch VOD? The downside of using the Twitch VOD method to get a local copy, rather than OBS is that any muting carried out on your stream VOD (due to music being played, etc) will be present in the local copy, too, whereas using OBS to record as you stream won't have that issue.

Yeah, I saw an article that showed how to download in Video Manager, but it must have been an older version of it. I don't know why they got rid of it. I'll have to see if I can record locally as well next time, and if that'll do damage to the stream or something. I don't have the greatest of computers.

I have the option to download my videos. I wonder why you cannot download yours. We streamed RE7 yesterday and I can download both of those.

Logistical Question(s):

1. We are streaming currently from an Xbox One via the native twitch app. Yesterday we lost twitch and didn't notice for about 3 minutes (it happened to occur right before a big jump scare in RE7 and we didn't capture it Oh well). What kind of options could we look at to avoid that in the future? We are hardwired into the internet and are using the Kinect for Mic/Camera (I know, but it's what we have at the moment. Humble Beginnings, lol.)

2. I should have a very nice gaming PC built by end of March/Middle of April, so we'll have access to more tools at that point, but if we were to keep streaming using the xbox from time to time, how could we incorporate the xbox and PC into a better setup?

Thanks for any advice or suggestions.

Not sure how much configuration the Xbox App allows, but you can find your nearest/best response Twitch server and stream to that in things like OBS on PC, maybe the same on Xbox? Other than that, it may have just been a twitch issue itself. You could possibly watch your stream yourself on a laptop/tablet/phone or what have you to make sure it's still up. Far from fool-proof, however.

Once you have a gaming PC, you can obviously stream directly from that for PC Games. A potentially better (?) Xbox streaming solution would be to output the Xbox to a capture card in the PC, and then stream to twitch from the PC (using OBS/Xsplit). This allows you to have your usual PC based streaming overlays, brb screens, alerts or what have you.

I did try to stream the XB1 to Wind10 Xbox App, and then stream that to twitch (cutting out the need for a capture card), but couldn't get it to work. I think the Xbox App is integrated into Windows 10 at a lower level than the OBS capture software can get access to (It's probably more alike a Metro App than a full windows one, maybe?)

MikeHaegaman wrote:

I have the option to download my videos. I wonder why you cannot download yours. We streamed RE7 yesterday and I can download both of those.

Are you a Prime member? I am, which is one reason I feel I should be able to download it. Where do you go in order to get the download option?

Partnered streamer. So someone like me gets nothin'.

ccesarano wrote:
MikeHaegaman wrote:

I have the option to download my videos. I wonder why you cannot download yours. We streamed RE7 yesterday and I can download both of those.

Are you a Prime member? I am, which is one reason I feel I should be able to download it. Where do you go in order to get the download option?

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/L3QScaj.png)

Video Manager, More, Download.

I am a prime member but I feel like I was able to do that beforehand too.

I might not be looking at the actual video manager then. I'll check back this evening.

Thanks for looking into it.

MikeHaegaman wrote:

2. I should have a very nice gaming PC built by end of March/Middle of April, so we'll have access to more tools at that point, but if we were to keep streaming using the xbox from time to time, how could we incorporate the xbox and PC into a better setup?

Thanks for any advice or suggestions.

Typically this requires the use of a video capture device like an Elgato.

That's what I assumed.

I also assume if I am capturing our reactions via a nice webcam, I'd simply sync the elgato footage with the camera footage, correct?