How to Multistream: Live Streaming to Multiple Platforms
Live Streaming is thriving more than ever right now; and it’s especially prominent if you’re a DJ who’s lost all your gigs due to COVID-19. If you’ve spent any time on social media over the past few weeks, you’ll notice that all your favourite artists, as well as their favourite artists, are streaming. What’s more, it’s predicted that by 2021, Live Streaming will account for up to 13% of all consumer internet traffic.
So if you’ve thought about live streaming your DJ Sets, one of the biggest dilemmas you’re probably faced with is which platform to use? In 2020, nearly every online social platform has live streaming capabilities. So which one’s going to give you the best engagement with your audience? Well, what if you could use them all at once? That’s where multistreaming comes in, and there are a few platforms out there that let you do just that, with ease!
Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work for Instagram due to its limited streaming capabilities!
- What is Multistreaming
- Benefits of Multistreaming
- When shouldn’t you multistream?
- Best Platform for Multistreaming
- How to Multistream with Restream
What is Multistreaming?
If you’re streaming video, you’re going to want to use something like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram Live, or one of the many other social networks offering this service. The problem here is, you can only stream to one platform at the one time. Whether you’re a DJ, Gamer, or content creator, you’re likely a regular user of a number of these platforms. So it makes sense that you’d want to maximize your audience reach for each stream you do.
Therefore, you’re left with 2 options. You either do a separate streaming event across each platform you use, or you choose one, and then upload the recorded video to every other service after your stream has finished.
If you choose to do separate live stream events, it’s likely going to chew up a whole heap of your time. Likewise, if you’re going to use your already recorded live-stream and then upload to other platforms after the fact, you’re going to lose the excitement of being “live”. Therefore, your fans on those platforms won’t be able to take advantage of the opportunity to engage with you live. Multistreaming is the solution!
Multistreaming allows you to stream a singular piece of live content to a number of different platforms simultaneously. As an example, if DJ City were to do a weekly live stream show in which we broadcasted across YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook Live; that would be classed as a multistream or multistreaming.
What are the benefits of Multistreaming?
The main benefit of simultaneously streaming your content across a number of platforms is that it frees up your time while helping you reach the most amount of people possible. But with that, comes a number of great perks, including:
Maximise Your Reach
The more platforms your content is streaming, the more chance you have of people seeing you. But not only does this give you the opportunity to maximize reach from your existing fans, but you also increase the chance of being discovered by new audiences as well. This is especially because platforms such as Facebook tend to prioritize live content by using suggestions as well as sending notifications to everyone who might be interested in the stream.
As a result, you not only get more people tuning into your stream. But you also increase your brand awareness and have the potential to earn yourself some new fans for life.
Take advantage of each platforms benefits
With so many different platforms, each one has its own unique benefits in terms of the features they have to offer. For instance, Twitch is a great platform that allows your audience to give quick donations, unlike platforms such as Facebook. Donations are a feature that’s currently cherished by many due to the fact that COVID-19 has wiped a lot of people’s incomes clean. Twitch also has a convenient marketplace-like directory where you can search for different categories depending on what you’re looking for; allowing for you to reach a new audience of people.
Then you have Facebook which is renowned for putting your stream in front of the eyes of everyone who likes your Facebook page. This is because Facebook heavily prioritizes live video content over all other forms of content.
Use new and untried platforms
It seems like there’s a never-ending amount of new platforms and social networks popping up. But if you haven’t already amassed a large audience on these platforms, it doesn’t really make sense to dedicate an entire live stream to it perhaps. For instance, TikTok is an emerging platform that is continuing to grow day by day that also has live video features available. With many people just starting to get their accounts off the ground, it’s hugely beneficial to be able to stream to platforms like this without having to put any extra effort in.
Gather Insights
Multistreaming can also be a great way to gather useful insights and information on your audience that you can use to your advantage. By using the insights available on all your platforms, you can work out exactly where your audience is active most. You might be surprised at which platform gives you the most engagement. From there, you can use this information to your advantage by ensuring you’re regularly posting and engaging on those particular platforms.
Keep your audience in the one place
When you’re using the one platform for your streams, you’re often putting constant effort into driving your audience to where the live stream is happening. If you’re driving your audience from Facebook over to Youtube to watch your stream, you’re giving them more work to do. Therefore, there’s even less chance that they’ll actually follow through. So you’ll keep your audience much happier if they’re able to remain in their native environment.
When shouldn’t you Multistream?
In most cases, we’d highly recommend streaming to multiple platforms if you have the resources available. However, there are some exceptions to the rule. For instance, if you’re a full-time YouTuber relying on your YouTube paycheck to make a living; it likely doesn’t make sense from a business point of view to offer your stream on Facebook and Twitch. This is because your YouTube content is your product. So it’s going to be worth the time and effort pushing your audience over to your YouTube channel.
You should also make sure you’re familiar with the platforms you decide to stream on. So if you don’t know what the hell Periscope is, there’s no point aimlessly streaming to it. We’d recommend sticking to platforms you’re competent with and are active on outside your broadcasts.
The Best Multistreaming Services
Like any online service, there are a number of options you can choose from when it comes to multistreaming services, including Restream, Castr and Switchboard.
It’s worth doing a bit of research of your own to find out which service will suit your needs best. However, we tend to recommend Restream as it seems to be the most popular, as well as being packed with features.
Benefits of Restream
Support for over 30 platforms
There’s no point in using a service that doesn’t support the platforms you want to stream from. Thankfully, Restream supports multistreaming to over 30 platforms, including all the big ones such as Facebook Live, YouTube, and Twitch. So you’re guaranteed to have a seamless streaming experience with all the platforms you need!
Solutions for all platforms
If you do find there’s an obscure platform that you prefer using and isn’t yet supported by Restream, there’s still a solution. Thanks to Restreams custom RTMP service, you can take the RTMP URL and Stream Key from your platform and you’ll be good to go. Even then, it’s rare you’ll find you ever need to do this!
Analytics
What’s the good of streaming to several platforms if you don’t have a way to gauge how your audience is interacting? Restream offers an intuitive analytics service that allows you to gain some valuable insights into how your audience is interacting with your stream.
Stream Pre-Recorded Content
Live Streaming doesn’t just have to be for live content! If it suits you better, you can pre-record your content, then schedule your video to stream at a later time. This can be useful if you want to spend your time interacting with fans during the stream. Or even if you wanted to stream at a completely different time to accommodate different timezones!
Easily Handle Multiple Chats
One of the biggest hurdles when streaming on multiple platforms is managing all the different chats across each service. With Restream, you’ll see all your chats in one place, so you won’t have to worry about jumping back and forth between chats and platforms.
Free Service
Although to get the absolute most out of Restream, you’ll want to opt for one of their paid plans. However, there is a free option that’s a great choice to get started with and work out if its the service for you. The only downside with the free version, is that you’ll have to live with a Restream watermark on your live broadcast. But it’s a small price to pay in order to test out the features of the service!
How to Multistream?
If you’ve already been live streaming across certain individual platforms, making the jump to multistreaming doesn’t have to be extremely difficult. Generally speaking, there’s not going to be much difference in the way you set up your hardware for multistreaming than you would a regular live stream. So you can still use apps like OBS to ensure your stream is looking up to scratch.
From there, that footage will have to be fed into an additional software or cloud service that’s capable of streaming your content to a number of platforms at the same time. But the steps remain simple!
Make sure you have accounts on all platforms you want to stream on
It might sound obvious, but if you want to stream from YouTube, you’ll have to have an active channel. Just like if you want to stream from Twitch, you’ll have to have a Twitch account. So make sure you’ve got accounts on all the platforms you intend to utilize!
Sign up to a multistreaming solution
Next, you’ll have to choose and sign up to your multistreaming service. For the purposes of this article, we’re using Restream.
Set up your multistream service and connect it with your gear and streaming service
If you’re using OBS, you’ll want to make sure it’s set up to talk to your Streaming service. Likewise, if you’re streaming straight from Restream, you’ll want to make sure your cameras or capture hardware is set up correctly inside the app.
Go LIVE!
Finally, you get to go live and enjoy all the benefits of having your stream broadcasted to a number of your favourite platforms. Allowing you to maximize your audience and engage with as many people as possible!
The Final Say
Finally, the benefits of multistreaming your live video content are pretty clear. Stream to more places and more people will not only see but engage with your content; and as a result, your following will continue to grow. Given that it’s extremely simple to setup a multistream, you’d be missing a great opportunity if you didn’t at least give it a shot!
Alternatively, if you’re just looking for a simple solution to stream your DJ sets to your phone, check out our video below!
