- As a streamer, you should always be looking for ways
to make your stream more engaging for your audience.
So in this video,
I'm going to show you how you can highlight individual messages
from your chat and show them directly on your stream
so your audience really feels a part of your broadcast.
You can use this feature to host a Q&A segment,
share on stream when someone redeems a highlighted chat
or just feature specific messages from your community
to all discuss together.
And the best part is this is free
and completely customizable,
so you can use your own brand colors and designs
to really match your stream's aesthetic.
Trust me, your audience is going to love this.
(bright music)
Before jumping in, I'd like to give a quick thank you
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So the tool that we're going
to be using today is called featured.chat.
It's incredibly simple to set up and it's going to allow you
or optionally, even your mods to select specific messages
from chat to then show on stream.
This doesn't require any plugins or extensions either.
This is simply just a website where we customize our options
and then a browser source
that we'll add to our streaming software
which will actually show the messages on your stream.
(bright music)
So to get it set up,
simply visit featured.chat in your web browser of choice,
log in with your Twitch account, and authorize the app.
Click to enable featured.chat on your channel,
and you should see a whole bunch of settings now available.
Now as tempting as it might be to dive
into all of the settings and customize things right away,
let's first get the basic feature working
by adding a browser source into our streaming software.
So come up here to the my browser source section
and copy the URL called main.
Next, open up your streaming software.
For me, that's OBS Studio
and add a browser source in whichever scene you want.
Name the source something memorable
and then paste in the URL you just copied.
Set the dimensions to match your canvas resolution
and then select to control of the audio via OBS
and you can press OK.
So now that's set up,
let's test a Twitch chat message to see if it displays.
Open up your Twitch chat,
or if you already have it docked somewhere in OBS,
even easier, type out a test message of more than one word
and then head back to the featured.chat website.
Click on my dashboard over here on the left
and this'll open up your chat log
as well as a queue of messages you can display on stream.
You should see your test message over here on the right
by clicking on it
or by clicking this little purple plus button,
we can then add it into our queue.
The queue is especially useful
if you have a busy chat that is moving really quickly,
as it allows you to preview any messages
before you actually show them on your stream.
You can also drag, drop, and reorder chat messages here
in the queue to better prioritize questions or messages.
Hovering your mouse over a message
in your queue will show you a preview of
what that will look like on your stream,
but to actually display it on your stream,
you need to click this button here.
If we head back into our streaming software,
we should hopefully see our test message now showing
on screen.
So now we've got the basic functionality working.
Let's get to customizing.
(bright music)
Head back to the featured.chat website
and go to the my settings page.
Here, you can choose from multiple different themes,
color schemes, you can enable and disable user badges
and profile images.
If the selection of themes
and color options here aren't enough
to match your stream design,
you can really dive under the hood if you wish to
by writing in some custom HTML and CSS.
Over on the right-hand side,
you can change some options
to control how the messages are actually shown
in the browser source.
So the position, the transition type,
as it shows or hides a message,
and the duration that a message stays on screen.
Below that, you can choose to enable audio
to play every single time a message is shown on screen.
There's a few different sound options here to choose from,
but unfortunately,
right now there's no way to choose a custom sound,
which I'd love to see in the future.
With any changes you've made to the design or sound,
you can head back to your dashboard,
hide and then reshow your test message
to see the updated styles in your streaming software.
(bright music)
One cool way that you could use featured.chat
in your stream is to allow people to highlight messages
that will then be shown on stream.
You can set featured.chat up
to automatically add any Twitch messages to the queue
where the chatter has redeemed
the Highlight My Message Channel Points reward.
To set this up,
all you need to do is enable the option in featured.chat,
automatically put highlighted messages
into the on-deck queue,
and then enable and customize the cost
of the Highlight My Message reward
from your Twitch Channel Point dashboard.
Then next time someone redeems
that reward using their Channel Points on Twitch,
their message will automatically show up in your queue
for you to then show on stream.
(bright music)
Another way you could use this is to have a Q&A section
of your livestream.
To do this, you could prompt your audience
to submit questions by typing
in a prefix before their question,
something like !q.
Then in featured.chat,
you can head over to the AMA/QNA tab of your dashboard,
click the settings cog, and then enter in your prefix.
Then you can start filtering by clicking this play icon
and any chat messages that now begin with that prefix
that you've told your chat about will be shown here,
allowing you to easily just see the questions being asked,
which is especially useful if you have a busy chat.
As you answer each question,
you can show the question on stream
and then hide it once you're finished
and move it to the next item in your queue.
(bright music)
To make managing featured.chat a little bit easier
so you don't have to keep going back to the website,
they even a dockable page that you can add into OBS.
Head back to the my settings page
and under other, enable the option broadcaster skip queue.
This will just allow you to select messages directly
from your chat to go straight onto showing on screen
without having to go to the queue.
Next copy the OBS Dock URL,
and go back to OBS Studio, head up to view, docks,
custom browser docks.
In here, we want to add a new window to dock
in our OBS Studio.
We'll call it featured chat and then paste in the URL here
and click apply.
A new window should pop up in OBS that you can drag
and position and dock wherever you want in OBS Studio.
Now, when we see a message in chat
that we want to highlight,
we can use our featured.chat dock
to push the message through automatically
to show in our browser source.
(bright music)
If you run a particularly popular stream,
it can be helpful to add moderators
to help you select the questions from chat
or the messages on chat that you would like
to show on stream.
There's a single button press
if you want to add all of your Twitch moderators
as administrators on featured.chat,
or you can add specific accounts by typing
in the usernames here. - Huh, nice.
- [Pete] These users can then log
into featured.chat using their Twitch account
and will be able to help you by choosing chat messages
from your Twitch chat to push to your queue.
And you can, of course, easily remove administrators here.
- What the (beeping)
- I really hope that the featured.chat developers
keep working on it because I think it's an awesome platform.
I'd love to see them release a YouTube version
so it also works for YouTube streamers
as well as Twitch streamers.
Personally, I do my podcast every single week on YouTube,
and I'd love to be able to feature messages
from the live chat as we go along.
Hopefully, you've found this video helpful.
If you have, do give it a big old thumbs up
and I'll catch you guys in the next video.
Peace. (bright music)