Come hang out LIVE with our founders Geige & Dan — they'll answer your questions about StreamYard: a browser-based tool that lets you live stream, record videos, and host webinars.

Welcome to episode 236 of the StreamYard Live Town Hall.

My name's Gage and I'm here with Dan, of course.

Really excited to chat with all of you tonight, catch up on some of the latest features and cover some of the topics for tonight.

And yeah, for anyone new here, Dan and I are the founders of StreamYard.

We do these town halls every single Sunday at 6 p.m.

1 is to stay in tune with all of you, Go through the same flow that you all do with your own shows and productions.

That's why we're calling it Ask StreamYard.

So if there's anything you'd like us to touch on tonight, leave it in the chat.

We'll do our best to get to as many as we possibly can.

And 3, I always mention the 3 pillars of StreamYard, which are ease of use, stability, and professional stream.

So if you're about those 3 things, StreamRider is the tool for you.

See people tuning in from all over the world tonight.

Cole in Texas as well with, yeah, Dan, Dana, and I are all in Texas.

All right, before I forget, we have some awesome shows on Streamrack.

We have YouTube channel reviews with D and Daniel the second Saturday of every month.

Really great show if you're looking to grow on YouTube.

Dean and Daniel are both pros when it comes to all things live streaming, all things video.

But really useful show because they give specific feedback on individual channels.

You can get a sense of how to think about your niche or how to think about how often to post, basically every question you might have when it comes to YouTube.

And then we have Enhance Your Livestreams, the last Tuesday of the month with Nick Nimmin, who again, Nick is a pro when it comes to all things video, but tune in there for your specific livestreaming questions.

And then 1 thing we've been doing at the start of these so that we get to know a little bit more about you and you get to know a little bit more about us is a fun fact.

And the fun fact we had for tonight, which I'm sure is a popular topic for some folks is, are you using AI for anything?

So artificial intelligence for anything in your personal life?

I've definitely tried using it in a bunch of different ways for all kinds of different things.

The ones that have actually worked pretty well for me is Anything to do with coding or debugging code, I think that's, you know, it's not just me, a lot of engineers are definitely using it.

I've definitely used it to just ask random questions once in a while to see if it maybe has, you know, it's quicker to get an answer than Google, but I find I'm kind of switching back and forth between the 2 for those types of questions, just sort of general questions.

And those are the ones I found to be most useful.

But obviously, I'm also not writing blog posts and stuff.

And I think I would definitely be looking into if I was doing that.

I've definitely often like checking out like lots of AI tools to see how they work and function and just keeping tabs on what's going on.

In terms of legitimate personal use cases, the most common way, you actually mentioned it as well, is Not a complete substitute, but there's a lot of stuff that I used to Google that now I will sometimes use chat GPT for, so that's sort of the main 1.

And it's pretty cool for quickly finding certain types of information.

So yeah, if you guys have any personal ones, let us know.

I see we already have a few questions, so let's cover some of those before getting into some of the previous updates.

And then we also have 1 other small update that we're excited to announce for tonight.

Paranormal Gateway talk says, I got the feature from last week, noise removal, but not the AI filter.

Yeah, that's also the same as the first topic we had for tonight.

So in case you missed it last week, we announced that we added a few AI features, or 2 AI features, 1 of those being noise removal and the other 1 being the touch-up filter.

So the noise removal has been fully rolled out, So everyone should have access to that.

The touch-up filter, there's some percentage of folks that have access, but we waited a little bit longer on the rollout, because we are tweaking a few additional things with it after getting some feedback from folks.

So if you don't have access to it yet, hopefully by the end of this week or maybe even sooner you'll have access.

And in case you did miss the update from last week, anything we should add specifically Dan about noise removal and the touch up filter?

Yeah, I can just describe them both really quickly because I think that's helpful, especially for anyone that wasn't here last week.

So the first feature, like Gage mentioned, background noise removal, that is already released for everyone.

So this is an opt-in feature at the moment.

So maybe we turn it on kind of intelligently if we think it's useful or necessary to turn on for someone, but we didn't wanna just start turning on for a bunch of people.

So you have to actually turn it on if you want it and basically just removes background noise.

So if you're say you're in an airport or something and there's typically all the, then your mic will pick up all that background noise.

Like it's not gonna be absolutely perfect, but it'll cancel out significantly more than you have if you don't have the feature on at all.

So when you're on StreamYard and you click on the settings, there's a modal that pops up in the audio section.

That's where you see the option to turn that on.

And you can also turn that on for your guests.

So if you have a guest, they have a bunch of background noise, you can just click the 3 dots on their name and turn it on for them.

With the AI TouchUp filter, Again, pretty similar to what it sounds like.

Basically, if you want to turn it on, it will just kind of clean up, like get rid of wrinkles or, you know, very subtly kind of hides wrinkles or if you have any blemishes on your skin, it will kind of clean that up a little bit.

I think there's some set of people that are really excited about the feature and love it and others that are thinking like there's no way I would ever use that feature.

Whichever camp you're in it is still quite a cool feature and that's the 1 like Gage mentioned it has rolled out to some people but we're going to continue rolling it out throughout the week.

Just want to make sure it works as good as possible for everyone.

And yeah, if you have had a chance to test out noise removal or you do have access to the TouchUp filter, if you have any feedback for us or things you'd like to see in the future from those features, definitely let us know.

Max says, are these, these features are for paid StreamGuard, right?

No, Mac, they're for all StreamGuard plans.

So even on the free plan, you'll have access to the noise removal and the touch-up filter.

I guess just to answer the fun fact question too, that is how I'm also using AI, all kinds of stream-driven features.

Not personally using the touch-up, but background noise removal actually on right now.

Let me see if I can find it again from Mary Ann.

Sounds like she had success with it, removing straight noise.

This guy says, do you use AI to generate these icebreaker questions?

I might've been on an older version of chat GPT.

And I wasn't like overly impressed with the question.

So mostly Dan and I just quickly come up with 1 before the show, but maybe we'll try it again.

Yeah, for stuff like that, it is quite good usually.

Mike's auto dealing says, can I win the duck tonight?

Well, just for you tonight, Mike, we will make the duck part of the giveaway for tonight.

Constance says, would love to know more about Live Air.

Yeah, so StreamYard On Air is StreamYard's webinar and private live streaming solution.

So basically we just wanted to take, we got a lot of feedback from folks where they're like, hey, I love the branding and the ease of use of StreamYard and being able to bring my guests in super easily.

And it's awesome for social streaming, but I have a webinar that I do that I'd love to have that same experience for my webinar.

That was a big reason for why we wanted to launch on air.

We're adding lots and lots of features to it.

Right now, we've really just focused on making it really stable and scalable, so you can host super large webinars with the same quality that you would get as your YouTube livestream.

And we have basic registration and email notifications.

But if there's anything else specifically about it you want to know, Dr.

I see another question from Studio Group regarding the camera softening.

If you don't have access, just keep checking and eventually you should have access.

Someone on LinkedIn says, what's the easiest way to put an unrecorded live stream on YouTube?

I'm guessing you mean maybe a prerecorded or a already recorded live stream, But if not, definitely let us know.

Streamer, if you mean pre-recorded, streamer does have a pre-recorded streaming feature built right into it.

So on Streamr, when you hit Create Broadcast, there's an option to select the pre-recorded mode.

And that's actually another announcement for tonight.

Separate from that is With the editor now, if you do a record only broadcast on StreamYard in post, after the fact, in our editor, you can now directly post that to YouTube for videos up to 20 minutes long.

Hopefully, 1 of those things was the question, but that's probably the easiest way.

Let's do 1 or 2 more, and then we'll get to some of the updates.

My guest wasn't able to comment on my live tonight.

Is there something I need to do on my end?

So it depends where they're commenting from.

The most common 1 that will sometimes come up is with Facebook groups.

With Facebook groups, there is an additional permission required if you want them to have their name and profile pick to be shown.

They have to like grant permission through a special link.

You shouldn't have to do anything extra on your end, unless the only way that that could be, that I could see that being something is if you had done some maybe some custom restrictions, like you've turned off the chat or something on your channel.

And so is it the viewer couldn't comment or the guests can't comment?

I think I read it as viewer, but it does say guests.

So if you mean like a guest within the Streamr studio.

So there's a few reasons why that can be.

So first of all, assuming you're talking about the guest commenting feature that we've mentioned the last few weeks, where your guests in the studio can actually comment to YouTube.

So first thing, you have to be streaming to YouTube.

Second 1, it can't be a private stream, but I assume you're not doing that.

The biggest 1 right now is if you have the guest destinations feature on, that we don't show the option to be all like also comment on the stream, it's just because they can also connect their own YouTube channel.

So if you go into your settings, into the guest settings where you can, you can see if you have the guest destination setting on, you turn that off, this should be able to comment.

Let's do 1 more, and we'll get to the announcement here.

Constance says, could you possibly increase more channels for the first paid tier?

Constance, like how many channels you would like to go?

There isn't actually a limit on the number of channels you can connect.

So, you know, say you do a show to, you know, you have separate shows on separate platforms, you can connect as many as you like.

But if you do mean multi streaming, there is a limit to 3.

Would be curious how, what the ideal number would be for you.

I'll just do 1 more and then we'll get to the update 1 from Cole says, how can I get a StreamYard discount link for my channel?

So 1 cool thing we have on StreamYard and we actually made some additions to it recently is the referral program.

So if you have a StreamYard account, you automatically have a referral link that you can use if you like.

And the way you access that, so if you just go to streamyard.com in the top right, do you recall what the section's called, Dan?

Even in the top right, there's a referrals tab or in the bottom left, there's also a referrals tab.

will have your own custom link there, Cole, that you can use and add it to your channel if you like.

And we really appreciate the referrals if you do choose to use it.

And with that, let's get to some of the topics we have for tonight.

1 quite small update, but I think probably a welcome change for quite a few folks, is how we handle links in the private chat.

So previously, if you were to type in, you know, streamyard.com or whatever the link is, it wouldn't automatically be clickable unless you chose to include the HTTP or HTTPS with the colon slash slash or whatever beforehand.

But now it will automatically recognize links and make them clickable for you.

So very small feature, but hopefully it is a quality of life improvement for some of you.

And actually just on a related question, I'm curious, and I think you might even have a banner for this, but if not, no worries.

I'm just curious if there's any feature requests for the private chat.

So when you guys are in the studio, you have your guests in the studio with you, is there anything you wish, any features you wish we could add to the private chat for communicating between you and your guests?

And the, another 1 we had, we already talked about it, but in case you missed it, just to reiterate, we did add some new AI features last week, which was the background removal and the touch-up filter.

So if you had a chance to use those, definitely let us know your feedback.

And like we mentioned before, touch up is still rolling out, but everyone should have access to the background noise.

Robert says, is there an additional charge for on-air?

So there's not an additional charge, Robert, but not every plan has access to on-air.

So the first plan where you get access to on-air is on the professional plan of StreamYard, and that will give you access to up to 250 viewers for the on.

There's no limit on the social platforms, right?

So if you have 10, 000 people watching on YouTube, there's never gonna be any restriction for how many people are watching on YouTube, but specifically for the webinar functionality, you can have up to 250 folks watching.

And then the higher tier plans scale with more viewers.

So the next tier plan allows you you have up to

And all the details are on the, the pricing page.

We did want to make it super competitive, like compared to most webinar products.

I do think it's quite competitively priced.

It's just baked into the higher tier plans.

I look like a runway model, but I do love it.

That is part of the reason why we only rolled it out to a certain group of folks.

We are tweaking with some of those settings and getting feedback.

I don't know if we're gonna end up having a dial for it.

In the first version, I think it's just going to be set, but we are still sort of tweaking what the optimal preset is, right Dan?

Yeah, yeah, I think there's some people that would like it a little more intense and some a little less intense.

So yeah, trying to judge if we need a secondary setting or not.

All right, let's see what else we had here.

Gotti says, using the green screen feature, I thought I heard you can use video in the background now, but I don't see that option coming soon.

So we don't have video backgrounds just yet.

We do have the option to upload GIFs so you can achieve a similar effect with it.

I don't think we support those for green screen backgrounds right now.

Yeah, so for green screen backgrounds, it's just the static image.

It's definitely possible that we'll add something like that in the future, Gadi.

I think long term, we would like to support that.

I don't have a date or anything, but it's something we'd like to support.

My Blue says, haven't tried StreamYard yet.

Well, I encourage you, My Blue, to give it a shot.

1 thing that is cool is that I would recommend you try it.

If you do actually, you know, if your goal is to start live streaming, is to maybe just test with like an unlisted YouTube broadcast or maybe a record only broadcast to sort of maybe get a feeling with it or maybe even post some recorded videos on YouTube, but good luck.

Yep, Yeah, having a guest can also help quite a lot.

Mikey says, sometimes I forget to unmute.

I accidentally recorded a 9 minute live stream muted.

I do think we have something, we do have a message that will, we do detect if you're talking muted and there will be a message that pops up that says like, hey, you're muted.

It's small, so it's possible that you missed it.

Yeah, we put it right top center on the screen.

So like right below the header inside the studio, a message will pop down and says, Hey, your mic is muted.

Yeah, I get that you could potentially miss that, especially if you're focusing on comments or something.

So yeah, be curious if anyone else has ever had that as well, or maybe you just weren't quite talking high enough to hit it, but it's pretty sensitive.

I think you would set it off pretty easily.

So yeah, maybe it's just how you feel the site basically.

If we can maybe make that slightly more noticeable, maybe like animate it a bit more, something like

QuestivoCon says, please get Dan something to put on his walls.

LoneWolf says, what does it take to be a StreamYard feature tester or a beta tester?

For the vast majority of features, LoneWolf, we roll it out similar to what we did with touch up filter, it'll just be sort of like a random small group of folks.

And we'll get a lot of feedback just from that sort of random group.

And the nice thing about it being random is it is sort of representative of the overall user base versus sort of it being a specific group.

Occasionally, for maybe for larger features, we will usually these town halls are a good way to know when we're testing something like that.

We will have folks reach out specifically for a certain thing.

And we'll say, hey, shoot us an email if you're interested in testing x, y feature.

We haven't done that for a while, but it is something that we will occasionally do.

Stillnixfan says, is there a way to incorporate receiving phone calls into StreamYard?

Yeah, that 1 comes up quite a bit, Stillnix.

The easiest way I would say is if you are using an audio interface like a Rodecaster or something, A lot of those things have the ability to plug in a cell phone, which is pretty cool because you basically someone can just call that number and it will go directly from your audio interface into StreamYard.

If you don't want to use a hardware type solution, I have heard of folks using things like Google Voice in combination with, there's different programs for different operating systems.

On Windows, I believe it's, the name's escaping me now.

But we do have it in our documentation still, Nick.

So if you just go to streamyard.com slash contact and type in, you know, phone call, Streamyard, it should pop up in the articles.

Constance says, can you allow on air with the basic plan?

It's definitely something we've talked about, potentially having maybe a tier that has a smaller number of viewers on the basic plan.

Oh, voice, NLTMW, thanks there for the voice meter is the name of it.

Glad that it's been a good solution for you.

Let's get to, we did have a couple other topics we wanted to ask about.

So let me do a couple of those before getting back to the questions.

We did briefly talk about it, but a few weeks ago, we did make a bunch of editor updates.

So like I mentioned before, now in StreamYard, after you do a live stream or a recording, within the StreamYard editor, you can actually edit up to a 20-minute long video and post that directly to YouTube.

See all StreamYard transcripts on Youtube

Ask StreamYard - The Easiest Way To Live Stream and Record Content (#236)