I have been considering livestreaming gaming (mostly Retroachievements, and maybe some noncompetitive speed running), but I cannot find/decide a good service. I am not considering it as a source of income, or wanting a huge number of viewers.
Twitch and YouTube are the most popular options. But I don’t want to use them at all, just because I don’t want to give any more of my or the viewers data to Amazon and Google.
The next popular options are Kick and Rumble, but both of their home pages are filled with right-wing political content. So, I am not swaying towards them either.
I looked at Trovo, and it is looking good. It has a very small user base, however. And as per my research, most of the users there, are streamers themselves, very low amount of viewing only users. So, what do you think of Trovo? (Edit - Trovo has a Russian speaking majority.)
I couldn’t find much about D-Live. How’s that?
The last option I could find was PeerTube. I don’t expect or want a large number of viewers, but I do prefer some discoverability.
I will be converting the live stream content to small videos and will be posting on PeerTube, and maybe even Odysee.
So, what are my options? Any one of the above, or something else?
If you want any amount of discoverability, you will have to go to Youtube or Twich since those really are the only platforms that have any amount of viewers. And even then, discoverability is pretty terrible, good luck promoting a new channel from scratch.
If you just want to stream for the sake of streaming and don’t mind having zero viewers, you can try PeerTube or Owncast. But do be aware that you will have zero viewers.
I feel like a growing solution would be to simulcast to Twitch as well as other platforms, and hopefully slowly encourage users to view via the other platforms.
Kudos to the OP - I stopped watching Twitch when Bezos went full Nazi, but couldn’t get YouTube off my list.
Pornhub
Is non-adult content prohibited there? Seriously asking
I’m trying to promote my music album
Nope, there’s a good bit of non-adult content on there….
Or so I’ve heard.
I have watched video game let’s plays on Pornhub, once. As a novelty.
I mean… where they dressed?
Nice jeu de mot btw
@KIKILOVE yeah absolutely. Could have been on YT
What kind of music? I’ll check it out :)
https://peertube.boomjacky.art/w/p1iqam7b8vkbUtoa68QkHB
It’s still a wip, there are issues :D plus it’s my first baby
I’m not at home right now but I’ll check it out later. I listened to the first couple minutes though and it’s a cool vibe!
ooooo. this all you or are you collaborating with other folk?
It’s me, a cheap 8 string guitar, a soundcard / midi foodswitch I bought for 50 euros at the pawnshop and a bunch of linux plugins
so i’ll admit it’s not the genre i’m typically listening to or playing in, but it was fun. without getting technical because i’m not sure how to communicate this technically, i enjoyed the energy coming off the music. i got pumped up. i liked it.
Aw thanks for listening :) it still need a bit of work and polishing and a nice video clip
what are you usually listening to out of curiosity?
there are CS videos that show up for me all the time
Moonbeam ( https://www.moonbeam.stream/ ) is currently in beta, but shows a lot of promise. Obviously, it’d be a smaller community though.
If you wanted to you could host your own server with Owncast.
I set one up on an old laptop and it worked well enough the few times a mucked around with it.
I would rather host PeerTube. But I want to be a bit discoverable. With self-hosted solutions, I will have to promote myself by myself.
Edit - I just discovered owncast.directory. This changes everything.
livestream with Owncast, host your VODs on Peertube. that’s what i do.
PeerTube is unfortunately not terribly well configured for Livestreaming. There is a tremendous lag.
https://owncast.directory/ not much but there are plenty of nice people on owncast.
What is your intent?
Do you just want to saturate your upload bandwidth for poops and giggles? Then consider just being That Guy who is constantly in one of the live channels on a community discord streaming everything to like 0.1 people per day.
Do you want to make a hustle out of this? Then your only real options are youtube or twitch and… discoverability is near zero for both of those. Even if you are one of the biggest streamers on the planet, convincing people to try a new platform is nigh impossible. Let alone for someone just starting out.
As a hustle, you should stream on Kick(10x the payout of Twitch) and then edit the vods into algorithm clips for YouTube and tiktok that would funnel to the Kick. You could multistream everywhere for maximum exposure, but that can get troublesome depending on how active chat is because you need to keep up and Twitch doesn’t allow you to display other chats on screen.
These days it is really hard to get going in streaming and youtube, so you really just need to cast a wide net and really work on refining your content. It takes years to get a decent second income, unless a big streamer reacts to you and then you have to try and keep the new subs without turning away the OGs.
Kick just got bad rep though with the dead streamer thing
Also it is fronted by hate groups that scam children and backed by a crypto casino.
Kick is evil, through and through.
Twitch doesn’t allow you to display other chats on screen
I’ve always wondered, couldn’t you work around this by having a feed with only the twitch chat for Twitch, and a feed with all the chats for every other platform?
I think you can comfortably encode 2 streams on basically any modern-ish card no?I’m no expert on the higher capabilities of multistream plugins and whatnot. I don’t think you could include twitch chat with the others if you are doing that sort of thing unless filtering chats to a given platform is an option with one instance. All the same, if you are handling the multistream locally you would want to do a dual PC setup if you are a game streamer. A lot of multistreamers use a relay service to reduce processing power while gaming.
You can multistream everything to everywhere with combined chat, but you have to sanitize the chat so it isn’t apparent that other platforms are combined or which chat is which if they are displayed separately.
