LinkedIn is underrated for content creators who want to make money. So we're making it easy for you to expand your audience there.

Come hang out LIVE with Geige & Dan — they'll answer your questions about StreamYard: a browser-based tool that lets you live stream, record videos & podcasts, and host webinars.

Welcome to episode 246 of the StreamYard Live Town Hall.

Dan and I, if you're new here, Dan and I are the founders of stream yard We do these town halls every single Sunday at 6 p.m Pacific and we do them for a few reasons 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, feel free to leave it in the chat.

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

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, StreamYard is the tool for you.

See folks tuning in from all over the world tonight.

We have Vic BC Live from Vancouver Island as usual.

Dan and I are very familiar and lived there for a long time.

Before I forget, we have awesome shows on stream.

We have YouTube channel reviews with Dean Daniel, the second Saturday of every month.

Both of them are pros when it comes to all things video and especially YouTube It's really fun show where they give specific advice on and feedback on individual channels like how to think about your niche or your analytics or Thumbnails everything you can imagine so definitely check that 1 out And then we also have enhancer live streams the last Tuesday of the month with Nick Nimmin, who again, Nick is a pro when it comes to all things video, but tune into that 1 for your specific live streaming questions.

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.

The fun fact we had for tonight was what's a place you've never been to, but you'd like to visit?

If I had to pick 1, basically any island, any tropical island is really high on my list.

I would say, you know, like Easter Island or something like that, like some remote island in the ocean.

For me, it's definitely a long list as well.

I've heard Japan's pretty cool and I've never been there.

I've always wanted to visit Japan, so I'd probably pick that 1.

New Zealand's also on the list, too, because I know you've been there.

Also, islands, not as small as the 1 I'm thinking, but

Well, maybe it's just because I'm from an island.

I always want to go to islands, but yeah, there's so many, honestly, I can list them for the whole show.

I see we already have a few questions here, so let's do a couple questions and then we'll get into...

We do have 1 new smaller feature to announce tonight and then we're also going to talk a little bit more about the announcement last week.

But yeah, let's see what else we had here.

Data is King says, I figured out how to import a custom banner in Canva into the StreamRoute Studio.

You have to be on the paid version of Canva.

Select the image as a PNG and save as transparent in Canva.

Canva works great if you're looking to create sort of cool overlays or a custom banner or stuff like that.

If you are looking for a free alternative, Google Slides works really, really well too.

So all you have to do in Google Slides, very similar, you can just sort of make a slide and there's an option to export it as transparent.

Yeah, probably not as many, well definitely not as many templates and stuff as Canva.

It's not necessarily built for that, but yeah, it does work pretty well actually.

BigMuzz is something that I actually personally use for it a little, quite a lot more advanced and then obviously the Adobe products are even more advanced.

It does kind of suck that it is on the paid plan.

Textboard is transparent PNGs, but you never know.

Maybe that would change in the future, and it is pretty cheap.

Speak English with this guy says never visited Brazil but going in April.

Brazil would actually be pretty high on my list as well, partially because there's so many folks on StreamYard that are from Brazil.

It's episode 246 and 1,000 subs from 100,000.

Yeah, we'll have to do something special for the

It's not quite as exciting as 300, but it's pretty cool.

Halfway, not halfway, but Home Rapid Repair says, question, have you considered adding simple sounds in studios such as clapping, cheering, laughing, et cetera?

Yeah, we've definitely considered doing it.

Obviously you can upload your own right now, so you can upload whatever sound you want, but yeah, we have considered just adding some simple sound effects as well.

It's not something we have immediately planned coming out soon, but I do get the purpose of it.

And I'd be curious for anyone else watching the chat, is there specific sound effects you would really want?

And we've asked this before, but yeah, any specific sound effects you want, but it sounds like for you, it's clapping, cheering, laughing, I'm sure there's more as well.

So feel free to let us know if there's other ones.

IOS fan says, is there a way to live stream in 4K?

So the highest from StreamYard now iOS is 1080p.

If we ever do add 4K, it would probably be on the recording side first.

I would also be curious if you have a specific use case in mind, or if you just want Basically the highest quality possible.

I would say think about 4k It's very hard to tell something is actually in 4k because most people's monitors are nowhere near that Level and then also most people's bandwidth can't really handle it So for live streaming and headed for certain use cases, it could definitely be useful.

But for a lot of use cases it's pretty overkill because most viewers can't really watch it or notice it.

Yeah lots of folks watching on mobile as well.

Southern Emperor says Are you guys planning on adding a feature for us to add audio for a call-in line?

It's something we're open to, Southern Emperor.

1 solution, there's a couple solutions that people do now.

1 that's pretty popular is using an audio interface like a roadcaster.

And with that type of device, you can actually connect something like a cell phone into the interface and just accept calls through the interface.

And then the interface goes into StreamYard.

I've seen people use that and it works really well.

And then there's also people that basically use like the virtual version of something like a Rodecaster, like VoiceMeeter.

We do wanna keep things relatively simple and there is always obviously the option for people to just go to the link from their phone, but something we're open to.

GTV says, have you guys thought about on-air for the basic plan for less viewers?

It's something that we've talked about and have considered.

Robin says, the show chat in the comment section, when you show it, turns blue.

Any way to show and then make it so we can see the comments still in the comment section so it's not covered with blue.

So you click a comment and then you can't actually see it unless you, as far as I know, you have to pull your cursor off of it.

Potentially, yeah, that is something we'd like to explore.

So yeah, no promises on when that would come up, but it is something we are aware of.

Senior Mac Borreco says, question, I had a setback and I'm using the free version for now.

Are there any new goodies on the free version that I should know about?

So a ton of the features that we launch are available on all plans.

I think 1 of the announcements we're making tonight, I believe that that 1 is going to be available on all.

Okay, so yeah, 1 of the features we're gonna get to tonight, Senior, is actually available on all plans.

And then tons of the features from not so long ago are also available on all plans.

Like the ability to do custom layouts is available on all plans.

Yeah, I would just get into a studio and play around with it.

I think you'll be surprised at like how much functionality is actually on the free version.

Yeah, most of StreamYard's features are on the free version and most of the new features we added on the free version.

It's just things like on air, for example, last week we announced custom registration for on air.

On air in general is only available on the pro plan and up.

But yeah, most features are available in all funds.

Let's do 1 more and then I want to get into some of the feature stuff.

Melnett says, will you be adding more than 100 overlays slash videos?

So that is on a per brand basis, Melnett.

So if it is the type of thing where it makes sense for you to split it into multiple brands, that would be the easiest way to get around the limit.

It is possible that we can add more in the future.

We wanted to make a high enough limit that most people wouldn't bump into it, but we also didn't want to make it unlimited because then there's the potential for people to do strange things like upload an insane amount of overlays.

So if it is something that people bump into, we are open to adding more, but I would be curious if the brand tab solves it.

Yep, and also just as a follow-up question, I'd be curious why you have 100 overlays and backgrounds.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, I'm just curious what exactly your use case is.

Like, is it all overlay images and you're just kind of going through like a slideshow of images, or do you just have a whole bunch of transparent overlays or a bunch of videos?

Just curious what kind of your use case is that you're hitting 100.

You're definitely not the only 1 to hit it, but just always want to learn more to see if there's something else we could maybe do to improve it besides just boosting the limit.

Or if maybe just using multiple brands would actually be a better way to do it for you.

We'll get to these in a second, but let's just get into a couple of the things we wanted to cover.

1 is in case you missed the last broadcast we did, last week we mentioned we launched custom registration fields for StreamYard OnAir.

And if you've never heard of OnAir or you're not familiar with OnAir, OnAir is basically StreamYard's ability for you to do your very own webinar on StreamYard.

Or if you want to host a private live stream, those are the types of things that you can do with StreamYard OnAir.

It's meant to be a super simple way to host something like a webinar.

But if instead of a webinar, you just want to also go to, like say, embedded on your own website in addition to a stream on YouTube and Facebook, it'll work great for that as well.

And the new functionality here, custom registration fields, is basically if you are wanting to sort of gate the content and capture some information before people can actually watch it, before we didn't allow you to customize it, and now you can actually add some of your own fields.

And we actually have a video here from Dana that walks through how it all works.

Anything to add there, Dan, before I play the video?

I'm so excited to unveil a brand new feature that lets you understand your audience better than ever.

Imagine hosting a webinar and knowing exactly where your participants are tuning in from or having direct channels like their phone number to connect with them deeper.

Now you can personalize your on-air registration page by adding custom fields tailored to your needs.

Want to know the countries that your participants are joining from?

The phone number and country will auto-populate based on your viewers' browser data, and your participants can easily adjust it if needed.

Beyond that, you can add text input fields, single-select drop-downs, and checkboxes to collect even more valuable insights from your viewers.

Simply head to your OnAir settings page, click registration on the left, and hit the add button.

This feature is available on all plans, professional and above.

Cool, So yeah, hopefully that's a helpful walkthrough.

So specifically, there are quite a few unique fields you can add.

So that's, you can only see it right at the end there, but it's phone number, text fields, selection dropdown.

So if you want to have something where like, hey, there's, I want to ask her a question and have 4 different options they can select and then check boxes.

So, you know, do you opt into marketing emails or something like that?

So it's really, it's pretty powerful and also very simple to use though.

I find you should be able to pick it up quite easily if you're planning to use it.

So yeah, if you guys have any questions or any feedback on what you'd like to see in the future with OnAir, definitely let us know.

I'll do a couple of questions here and then get into the new other feature that we're announcing.

Joshua says, what are the privacy issues with this?

Is it exportable for third party services?

So Joshua, it works exactly like how it would work if, say, you use something like HubSpot or ConvertKit or any other email provider or solution that allows you to do a form.

So without getting, StreamRoute collects it on your behalf.

So it's the same way as if you were collecting it through 1 of those services.

So it's, I mean, it's exportable to third-party services from on your behalf, right?

Like that's, that data is data that you're collecting and that is for you, like it's very popular for folks to take that and put it into their CRM and invite them to future content or maybe to purchase their course or whatever it is that you're doing with it.

Yep, yeah, and right now, in terms of exporting it to third party services, so say you wanna export that to MailChimp or ConvertKit or whatever your CRM is or something like that.

Right now we don't have direct integrations yet, but those are coming fairly soon.

But you can download just a CSV file and it'll have all those custom fields in there.

You upload it to the service, it'll map pretty easily over there.

So relatively straightforward, but it will be even easier once we actually have integrations.

All right, let's do a few other questions here.

Awesome, Kathy, glad the hoodie and pillow made it to you.

Thanks for the registration field update.

So not yet, obviously, we don't have that quite yet.

So it is on the list of things we would like to add.

It's not the next feature coming, but hopefully relatively soon.

Mike said, couldn't hear my guest when I was doing my on-air.

Mike, my best guess, but you said you could hear things like the sound effects and videos.

My best guess is that the default output that you had selected was not the 1 that you were expecting it to be.

It shouldn't be related to OnAir, that's more the studio itself, but I would just go to streamair.com slash contact if you haven't resolved it yet and they can walk through with you how to troubleshoot and test like which speaker is actually being

Matthew says, what is pre-recorded streaming?

So pre-recorded streaming is a feature we launched a while ago now, maybe about a year ago now.

Yeah, the whole idea is that, you know, maybe you have a regular show and for whatever reason You can't make it during a particular week, but you still want it to go out at the regular time and to have the live experience.

Pre-recorded streaming basically allows you to still use a lot of the cool StreamYard features, like the ability to schedule out to multiple platforms and all of that, but to just upload the stream beforehand.

And if you do choose to use the feature, we always recommend that you make it known that it's pre-recorded as each platform has slightly different policies, but most of them have policies around like, you're not supposed to trick viewers into like thinking it's live, right?

And I find it's usually useful if you have like a scheduled time you want to go live.

Pacific, every single Sunday, if for some reason we can't be there, we can schedule a pre-recorded video to go live at that time or some people use it just if they're a little nervous to go live for the first time, they can do a recording.

You know, if they screw up, they just do it again, or even edit it and then post that as a prerecord.

So it can be kind of a good way to break into live streaming.

Basically just if you can't have it go wrong, can be a nice sort of safe way to do it.

But I do personally, you know, I prefer actually going live and we recommend going live just because it's way more interactive with the audience.

R Ballard says, when I go live and play my intro, it's real abrupt at the end of start.

Is there a way to fade from 1 to another?

So there's not a way to fade at the moment, R Ballard.

The way we do our own intro is we start with an overlay up on the screen and wait a little bit and then play the video, which I think makes it less abrupt.

That being said, we are, I've alluded to it the best, we are in the same sort of theme that we did custom layouts, adding some deeper functionality in the studio for folks that, we wanna make sure it all stays very simple and easy to use, but for folks that do really wanna dig in and change other types of aspects of the stream, that is something we're working on, and it would sort of capture these types of things.

Yeah, and It should fade out really subtly.

It should at least fade out quite quickly.

Let's do 1 more here and then get into the other announcement.

Gary says, hey guys, any plans on adding things like polls during our broadcast?

So for StreamRoute OnAir, that's been a huge request.

I think when it comes to like if you are doing something like a webinar It's definitely a needed feature to have things like polls and Q&A.

So that is being worked on specifically for on-air We're not sure yet if we would make it support Other types of platforms partially because some of them have their own versions of polling and things like that.

But for on-air specifically, it's something that we're working on.

So let's jump into the other announcement for tonight, which was posting trimmed videos to LinkedIn.

So very similar to the feature we launched not so long ago with YouTube is now after your stream or recording is over, if you go to the, there's a little edit slash repurposing button there.

If you go into that, you'll find StreamRoutes Editor, which allows you to basically trim the video and potentially pick a section that you like and actually post that out to now LinkedIn in addition to YouTube.

So pretty cool feature if maybe you're doing a longer podcast, and after the podcast is over, you wanna choose a particular segment that you think makes it a good video on its own merits.

And yeah, and if you haven't had a chance to check out just the editor in general and the repurposing stuff in general, I would definitely take a look at it.

We've added a lot of cool stuff there and I think it's become a pretty useful part of the platform.

Yeah, so basically once you finish a show, say it's like a 45 minute recording or stream, you then wanna basically get more value out of your content.

So if you go to the library page on the dashboard, click your video, click edit and repurpose, you can resize the video, trim it to whatever size you want.

And you can do it either as a portrait short, or as like a full 16 by 9 regular video.

And then you can post that out to, well, to the ads now, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook.

And for LinkedIn specifically, right now it's just profiles.

So, And it's posting both long form videos, so 16 by 9 videos, I think up to an hour, or sorry, 20 minutes, and then short form LinkedIn shorts.

I don't know if they specifically call them that, or is it LinkedIn real shorts?

I don't even think it's technically a term, right?

And they kind of make it a square with a blur effect, but posting short clips to LinkedIn under 60 seconds as well.

So you can do both of those for profiles.

Cool, I think this just got covered, right?

Data is King's wondering how long the videos can be.

Yes, when you're doing like the shorts trimming, we just limit it to 60 seconds in general, and then that can be posted to YouTube shorts, Facebook Reels, Instagram, TikTok, and now LinkedIn as well, or a long form 1 that can be up to 20 minutes.

Jane says, I didn't realize we could do that.

Are you trimming and posting directly to LinkedIn?

Is there a link to the full instructions?

So directly to LinkedIn, it makes sense that you didn't realize because it did just get released.

We did add the YouTube functionality a bit ago.

In terms of the full instructions, if you just go to streamyard.com slash contact and click the button there, There's a resource to go directly to our support guides.

And if you just type in LinkedIn trimming, the support article should pop right up.

I believe as well, if you haven't been to the site since we launched it, do we have a video that walks through?

So yeah, I would recommend the support articles, Jane, but it's pretty easy to, to use as well.

See all StreamYard transcripts on Youtube

Ask StreamYard: Update To Help You GROW Your Community (#246)