Twitch and YouTube simplify co-streaming
If you’ve ever wanted to feature guests in your live streams, Twitch and YouTube have released new features to make this much easier for both the streamer and the guest. These are called Guest Star on Twitch and Go Live Together on YouTube.
Twitch’s Guest Star allows you to create a guest slot browser source in your streaming software and then gives you controls to switch between guests. Currently, you can bring up to 5 guests to join your stream, and you can even see and talk with your guests backstage before putting them on stream.
YouTube’s Go Live Together is much more limited as you can currently only host one guest at a time, and both the streamer and guest must use their mobile phones.
So whether you want to stream a panel discussion, host a call-in show, or go live with your podcast recording, Guest Star or Go Live Together may be worth using.
The new Stream Deck wants to do it all…
Elgato has launched Stream Deck +, combining the Stream Deck buttons everybody knows and loves with 4 dials and a touch strip. This aims to give granular control to streamers for things like their audio, lighting, and cameras.
At launch, the only dial functionality added has been for Elgato’s own applications:
- Camera Hub – changing the ISO, white balance and pan/tilt/zoom of Elgato webcams.
- Control Center – adjusting the brightness and colour temperature of key lights or light strips.
- Wave Link – muting and adjusting levels of microphones or audio channels.
- Volume Controller – change the levels of any Windows application.
The touch strip displays information about the dials beneath and can be touched to perform an action or swiped to navigate to the next/previous page of actions.
A clever feature introduced called Dial Stacking allows you to add as many actions as you want to each dial. Simply pressing the dial allows you to switch between any actions added. I’ve found this useful for adjusting music volumes for both my personal and stream mixes from one dial.
Stream Deck + is priced at $200 which I think is a reasonable price considering all the added functions and that it’s still $50 less than the Stream Deck XL which has been out for 3 years. The real value of Stream Deck + will come from developers building third-party plug-ins that can use the touch strip and dials.
For more details, check out my full review video on Stream Deck +.
Q&A feature launched by YouTube
YouTube recently announced a Q&A feature which will allow streamers to interact more directly with their audience. Streamers will have the option to start a Q&A and then filter their chat to only show questions asked.
Any question can then be pinned by the streamer so the audience can all see the question being answered. Managers or Editors for a channel are able to help manage the list of questions and individual messages or specific words can still be removed/blocked.
Q&A streams offer a great way to deepen the connection with your audience and YouTube’s new feature could be a simple way to host streams that allow for more audience interaction.
