One key to an engaging and interesting live stream is utilizing “Stream Alerts” to
indicate on stream when someone follows, subscribes, donates, and so on.
This creates a sort of “instant gratification” that feels very rewarding for some viewers
and incentivizes them to stick around.
In this video, I’ll show you how to set that up in OBS Studio.
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I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun, and welcome back to my OBS Studio
tutorial course.
I have many, many more videos on the software in the playlist linked in the description.
Check that before asking questions, and check the introduction video to learn how this course
works, if you get confused.
There are a few different platforms that can provide alerts for your live stream, but the
overall setup process on OBS’s side is the same.
I’ll be covering StreamLabs (formerly called “TwitchAlerts”) in this video, though
I can cover more options in future episodes if needed.
Alerts are integrated using the Browser Source plugin built into OBS Studio to load a web
page which gets green screened out and whatever shows up gets overlaid on top of your stream.
It sounds complicated, but OBS Studio makes it easy to implement.
Head on over to StreamLabs.com and log in with your Twitch or YouTube Gaming account
- whichever you plan on streaming to and need alerts for.
Once logged in, choose “AlertBox” from the left hand side bar.
This is where you can customize the alerts to your heart’s content.
You can add your own gifs to show on screen, unique sound effects, and customize the text
a bit.
To test your customization, you can click the Widget URL box at the top and hit “Launch”
to open a pop up alerts window.
Then click one of the test buttons to test your alert and see if it’s configured appropriately.
Ignore the green background; OBS Studio will remove this on its own.
To add the alerts to a scene in OBS Studio, click to add a new source, and choose Browser
Source.
Give it a name and hit OK.
Next to “URL”, paste in the URL from the widget URL box on StreamLabs.
Click “OK”.
It should just kind of show up as the red bounding box around nothing on your stream.
This is fine - the green background gets automatically keyed out.
You can hit one of the “Test” buttons on the StreamLabs website and make sure they
show up overtop your scene.
Keep in mind that the sound effect plays through your desktop audio device so you will hear
it on your computer, and that device needs to be added to your audio devices or your
audience won’t hear the alerts.
On the StreamLabs site, you can use the checkboxes above the URL to customize which alerts show
- for example if you don’t want to show every new follower, just subscribers, or you
only want to showcase donations, and so on.
As I said before, there are other sites that can give you stream alerts, but they work
mostly in this same way via browser source.
Hopefully this gives you a better idea of how to set them up for your stream.
A nice trick I like to use is to make a dedicated scene just for your alerts and overlays.
Make a new scene, call it “overlays” and set up your various overlays that you use
across multiple scenes within this scene.
Position and resize them as desired.
Now, you can go to each scene and just add this scene as a source to add them all at
once.
Then any changes to the “overlays” scene will affect all scenes with that nested scene
as a source.
This is a lot more convenient than trying to set it up on each individual scene.
I hope this episode of my OBS Studio tutorial course has been helpful for you.
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Until next time, I’m EposVox, Happy Streaming!
Thanks for watching this episode of my OBS Studio tutorial course.
More videos like this and a full master class are linked in the playlist in the video description.
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