What's up guys, welcome back once again to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel
where we aim to teach you everything to do with live-streaming and to do with
content creation within the gaming niche. Are you finding it hard to stand out
on Twitch amongst the tens of thousands of other streamers trying to stand out
there? Maybe you think 'is there a better platform to be streaming to as a
beginner streamer or as a streamer trying to get noticed?' You may know that
there's plenty of other platforms that now want to promote your live stream but
which one to stream to. Well in today's video we're going to be looking at a
service called restream which allows you to stream to Twitch, Mixer, Facebook,
YouTube Gaming, smashcast and over 30 other platforms, all at the same time, all
without any additional bandwidth or performance hits on your PC and all
completely for free. Sounds good? Let's dive in! So before we hop onto the
computer and take a look at restream, I think it's important to discuss what I
think the benefits are of using a service like restream and the first and
most obvious one is that it multiplies the platforms that you are on so not
only have you got a chance of just getting discovered on Twitch but if
you're streaming to other platforms as well there are people that are using
those sites and they may discover you there. So you obviously are multiplying your
audience because you're on more platforms so you're more easy to
discover. Now maybe one or two years ago, Twitch was really the only platform
where you could stream with the hopes of making it your career but recently a lot
of other companies have been getting involved, obviously you've got Google who
owns YouTube, you've got Microsoft who owns Mixer, you've got Facebook, you've got
Twitter, they're all getting into the livestream scene and they all want to
help promote your stream. So it's worth considering platforms other than Twitch
nowadays. Now add on to that that Twitch is probably the hardest platform to get
started on just because there's so many streamers battling to try and get
viewers, whereas services like YouTube Gaming have less people streaming to it,
so there's more chance for you getting discovered. Also YouTube just announced
that YouTube Gaming and YouTube, their subscriptions are going to be combined
so people that subscribe to you on YouTube Gaming, your videos are going to
appear in their YouTube feed and vice-versa, so this is
good news for people that are streaming to platforms like YouTube
Gaming and that is really why I think that restream is such a great service,
because you don't need to know which platform is best for you because you can
stream to all of them at the same time and then over time you can start to
understand where your audience lives and which platform is best for you to stream
to. Now you might be thinking that restream, that sounds great but how on
earth am I meant to monitor chat from Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, beem,
all of these different platforms that I want to stream to all at the same time
and thankfully restream has thought of a solution for that as well.
They've built an app that pulls all of these streams that you're streaming to,
all the chat into one window so we'll cover that later in the video but let's
dive into the restream software. So the first thing that you're going to want to
do is to head over to restream.io and sign up for an account, all that you need
to do is input a username, email and a password.
I've already created mine so I'm just going to log in instead but once you
have created an account you maybe have to click a link in an email just to
confirm that that is your email but you should log in and arrive at the
dashboard. Now the dashboard shows all the different platforms and the channels
that you've connected to restream, since this is a brand new account we haven't
yet connected any platforms so if we click on add channel we will open up the
options for all the different platforms that we can stream to with restream. As
you can see here there is a lot of choice. For the purposes of this video
I'm going to connect my Twitch, my YouTube and my Mixer accounts. Each time
that you select a platform to connect you will need to log in to that platform
and authorize restream to be able to access some of your information. The
process here has been designed to be super simple which I absolutely love, it
makes it so easy for you to add as many platforms as you desire. It's worth
noting here that if you want to stream to two different accounts from the same
streaming platform, so to separate Twitch accounts for example then you will need
to purchase the doubling package from restream. If you just want to stream to
one account from each platform you can stream to all 30 different platforms
completely for free. Each time you add a platform successfully you should see it
show up in your dashboard. There's an option to turn each channel on and off
so if you want to not stream to one of your accounts one day you can quite
easily turn it off here before you start streaming. You can also click this
little cog icon and go into the Edit settings which allows you to choose
which Twitch server to stream to and edit your display name.
I'd recommend leaving the server on auto detect as this is no longer the server
that is best for your connection between your computer and Twitch, but this is the
server that is best for the connection between restream's server and Twitch's
server. Underneath each channel name you also have a little status which shows if
you are offline, connecting or online to each platform. Once you've successfully
added all the platforms that you want to stream to we can start setting up OBS
studio or streamlabs OBS for streaming to restream. Remember how this works is
that we send our stream data from OBS or streamlabs OBS to a restream server.
Restream then takes this data and sends it on to our individual streaming
platforms. Over on the right hand side of your dashboard we first need to set up
which restream server we will be sending our stream to. There's a little
drop-down which gives you all the different server locations that restream
has. You should choose the option here which is nearest to you geographically.
There's also an option here to run a quick speed test which basically just
pings all the servers from your location and gives you the result in milliseconds.
Now I know that's not the greatest or most thorough connection test but still
it's better than nothing you want to choose the server with the lowest ping.
Next we are given our stream key. Now exactly like Twitch or YouTube or any of
the other services, you should keep this key completely private as it's the only
thing that's required somebody else to stream to all of your accounts. If for
some reason you share it with somebody like I'm doing in this video, you can of
course reset it by clicking this little refresh icon here. Select the whole
stream key and copy it then we'll head into our streaming software. I'm going to
show you both OBS and streamlabs OBS quickly since they're exactly the same.
So we start by going to settings, then the stream tab and under service we will
select restream.io, for the server we're going to choose the same server
that we just selected in the dashboard and then finally we are going to paste
in our stream key. In SLOBS it's the exact same process, go to Settings, stream,
select restream.io, choose the server and paste the stream key. One final thing
that we need to do if you're using OBS or streamlabs OBS is to fix a little
issue which currently exists that one of the restream engineers has
told me about for best results. So go back into your settings and select the
output tab, if your current output mode is set to simple we need to make a quick
note of these two settings here, our bitrate and our encoder. Now we can
change the output mode to advanced as we need to disable an option in here. First
let's set our encoder and our bitrate back to what we just noted down from the
simple tab, next we want to uncheck this box 'enforce streaming service encoder
settings', we'll then set our keyframe interval to 2 and change our profile to
main. I know this sounds complex and I haven't really explained what these
settings do, but it's just really an issue with how OBS and streamlabs OBS
are enforcing the restream encoder settings wrongly. Just to reiterate I'll
do it in streamlabs OBS as well. Go to settings, to the output tab, change to
advanced and check this box, set this to 2 and set this to main, and then make
sure that our encoder and our bitrate are the same as what they were when we
were on the simple output mode. Now technically we have done everything
that we need to do to go live on multiple platforms using restream but
there are a couple of other features I want to talk about before we do. Back on
the restream website the titles tab, this just allows you to change the title and
the game of all your connected stream channels. So here I can enter a single
title that I want to show as my stream title across all my connected platforms
and then of course I can go into each account and edit the game that I'm
playing if I want to. The social alerts tab this just allows you to post a tweet
and a status to your Twitter and your Facebook pages whenever you go live
which is pretty handy. The monitor tab is a really useful tool that allows you to
monitor your streams as they are happening in real time, and I know if you
go to your monitor tab right now since we're not streaming, it won't show
anything but I'm gonna show you some data from when I streamed earlier. Here
you can look at your live incoming stream data so you can see exactly what
bitrate, what resolution, what frame rate you're sending to restream as well as
things like dropped frames. The graphs below are super useful in diagnosing any
issues that you're having with your streams similarly to how I showed you
guys in the Twitch inspector video. I could go into absolutely loads of detail here
about how you can analyze these graphs and fix stream issues but I'll probably
save that for another more advanced video, so if you guys want to see that do
just let me know down in the comments. As well as looking at your incoming stream
data the data that you are sending from OBS or streamlabs OBS to restream, you
can also click across and look at the outgoing streams that restream is
sending out to the individual platforms live in real time. Again here we can see
useful data like bitrate as well as things like if restream has ever had to
reconnect to the service. The final tab that we will look at is the chat tab. Now
as I said earlier this is restream's solution for gathering all of your chat
windows from all the different platforms that you're going to be streaming to
into one. This way you can make sure that you don't miss any viewers who are
chatting to you and you can interact with them back no matter which streaming
platform they are watching on. Restream have also made it incredibly easy to
include this multichat window into your stream with OBS or streamlabs OBS if
you want your viewers to be able to see the chat that's coming from all
your different streaming platforms. You can include it quite easily. There are
two different options for the chat application, there's a web chat version
that runs in your browser or there's an application that you can download for PC
or for Mac. Firstly we'll look at the web chat
version. You can see here it shows you a preview of what your chat will look like
along with some example messages from multiple platforms. Each message will
show an icon of the platform, the chatting users username on that platform,
as well as their message and the time of the message. On the right here you can
change the theme between a few different options, so have a play around see which
one you like the look of. Next you can change if you want new messages to show
at the bottom or at the top of the chat window. You also have a couple of options
here to alter the opacity of both the message background and the chat
background as a whole and you can change exactly how large the text and the chat
window is by adjusting the scale here. Finally you can choose to hide messages
after a number of seconds, so this is useful if you are a newer streamer or
maybe you're just a streamer that is trying your hardest to grow and you
don't have that much chat interaction going on, you don't want people with
messages to stay up on your stream for multiple seconds so you can you can set
a timer here for how long they should show for before they're hidden. At the
very top you'll also have a long link that you can use in OBS or streamlabs
OBS as a browser source to have your chat as a source that you can display on
your stream, but we'll be covering that once we've downloaded the Windows
application. Now although the web chat is awesome the downloadable application has
quite a few more features many of which we won't have time to go into in this
video but I'd still recommend it if you're going to be streaming with
restream often. You should download and install the standalone chat application.
Once it has installed it should allow you to log into your restream account so
log in and it should look a little like this. Now up in the top left corner it
should show the number of platforms that your chat is currently connected to as
well as the number of users in all of the combined channels. If you click
anywhere in the top left here it will show you all of your chats, their current
connection status and how many users are watching on that channel. Now before we
dive into the settings of this chat app let's just have a look at the chat in
action. So I'm going to open up my browser and open up my Twitch,
YouTube and my Mixer chats and then type some example messages to see them appear
in the restream chat window. As you can see all
the chats from the platforms I've connected are collected into this one
window and it's super easy to interact with your chat from all the different
platforms. If you click on the little cog icon up here, the settings window will
open up. Now I'm not going to go through all the settings here but you can see
that there are some cool features, things like connecting your discord, filtering
out certain words from your chat as well as filtering out words based on the
platform, you can change the actual window appearance and font sizes of the
messages, the nickname and the timestamp. You can set up notifications and
text-to-speech, there's an auto replying bot, there's
ways to export your chat and your viewer counters, loads of cool features but all
of those are probably going to call for a more advanced video at a later date.
But the one that I do want to quickly cover is embedding your restream chat
into your stream, now this is exactly the same as the web chat but all you have to
do once you've got the chat appearing as you want to, you know play around with
the appearance with these settings here on the right. Once you're happy is you go
up to the box here, copy this URL and go into OBS or streamlabs OBS and add a
new browser source to the scene you want to show you're chat on, then paste in the
URL, set the width and height to whatever you want and click OK. You now have your
multistream chat appearing in the stream for your viewers. It's really as
easy as that, you can go back and change the appearance, the opacity all
those kind of things and they will update in your streaming software. Now if
we quickly go back to our browser and test by typing in these chat windows, you
should see them appearing in your stream now. That is everything that we need to
set up to be able to use restream, we're ready to hit start streaming in our
streaming software and then head back to the restream dashboard. Now restream does
add about a 1-2 second delay to your stream which is pretty impressive really
considering what they are doing with all of that data. So after a few seconds we
should see that our stream preview should show and then we should also see
that our individual platforms go from offline to connecting, eventually to
online and that's it. We are now live on multiple platforms at the same time. So I
just want to quickly give a little word of warning to those that are lucky
enough and worked hard enough to be able to have signed
an affiliate contract with Twitch or a partner contract with Twitch because if
you look through your contract there might be a clause in there about
exclusivity. And it basically, it says something like that you
agree to stream to Twitch and that content won't appear anywhere else for
something like 24 hours. So have a look through your contract because if that is
the case then unfortunately you probably can't use a service like restream since
technically that content is going live to multiple different platforms at the
same time and not just Twitch, which is what is stated in your contract. So just
a little word of warning if you're lucky enough to have one of those contracts be
sure to make sure you're not breaking it. Well that is it guys, I hope you have
enjoyed and learned something new from this video, if you have please do give it
a thumbs up, it helps us understand what kind of content to keep creating and if
you haven't subscribed yet please do have a look around at the
Gaming Careers YouTube channel, has all these guides about streaming and
content creation in gaming. Finally as always I would like to give a massive
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video. Peace! [Music]