Come hang out with our founders 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 248 of the StreamYard Live Town Hall.

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

We have some fun stuff to talk about tonight and 1 smaller feature announcement, which I know a lot of folks have been waiting for.

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

And we do these town halls every single Sunday at 6 PM Pacific.

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.

And then 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.

Hopefully, it seemed like the show went really really well But yeah great to be back this this week.

Yeah, thanks Kelsey and Joanne as well And if anyone's not sure what we're talking about Last week we had to do a pre-recorded section.

It was the first time both of us couldn't make it.

And then Kelsey and Joanne did the rest of the show, which was great.

And yeah, before I forget, we have awesome shows happening on StreamYard.

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

Really great show if you're looking to grow on YouTube, both Dee and Daniel are pros when it comes to all things YouTube, and will give very specific advice on individual channels, like how to understand your niche or your next thumbnail to attract attention.

And then we also have Enhance Your Livestreams, the last Tuesday of the month with Nick Nimmin, who again is a pro when it comes to all things video.

So check that 1 out 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 was popsicles or freezies.

I'm not a huge fan of either, to be honest.

I think I would go with freezies, But it's definitely been a while on the, I know you have a pretty polarized opinion on this though.

It's not actually that polarized, but I also haven't had 1 for a while, but as a kid, I definitely preferred Freezy's.

They were called Otter Pops where I was, but I think Freezy's is a better name.

Let's get through some of these questions and then we'll get into the feature announcement for tonight.

Glad you're loving the video backgrounds.

We're going to get to those a little bit later.

Chantel says, use a queue for questions so we can see them easier.

It is also something we've been talking about in general lately is potentially ways to make that easier for hosts in general to identify questions.

Wendell's Cat says, question about the new video backgrounds.

Do you need to have a green screen for a better look?

You do not you do not need a green screen.

Green screens are only helpful if you're using the green screen specific feature.

The way video backgrounds work is they don't actually replace your in-studio background, right?

Like as you can see here, Dan and I are actually using it.

So you don't need to have a green screen or anything for that.

And even for like an actual green screen effect, we do also have the virtual option, which doesn't require a physical green screen either.

But for the best looking possible green screen support, we do recommend having the actual green screen.

Yeah, My wall actually works surprisingly well for a green screen.

We have 1 from John Lacy says, can we please have isolated recordings on by default or at least a team slash profile level default.

I like the idea of a team or profile level default.

And I assume in your case, and if you can maybe confirm, are you streaming as well?

Like, is it a live stream where you want local recordings on, or are you doing a recording use case?

I can't remember if it was you that reached out before, but I remember someone else in the town hall mentioning something very similar.

And our answer at the time is still the same, is that we do save the default for recording use cases.

So if you're just recording, we do save the default, but we don't save it right now for live streaming.

Kind of on purpose, because some people do turn it on just as a quick test, but you don't have a great connection.

Your quality of your live stream can be degraded by the local recording.

So we don't want a ton of people kind of turning it on accidentally and just leaving it on.

So yeah, right now you do have to default, or you do have to turn it on every time for a live stream, but recording, you shouldn't have to.

And we may address it for the live stream as well.

I don't know if it'd be a setting where we just remember the last 1, but yeah, it's something we're aware of.

I think apparently freezies is not as prevalent as a T of a term as I thought it was, but that's exactly right.

Packer dude, there's the ones where it's like, it's exactly what you said.

There's ice in a, in a little plastic bag that you push out.

There must be another term for those, or maybe they're just not very common in various places.

Cool, Chris from budgeting just because says, question, I got a message on TikTok that the town halls would be live over there on Sundays.

So I don't think we're actually live right now on TikTok.

We were doing that as a sort of like a test and also to just mostly just testing our access to TikTok live.

So if you have access to the tick-tock live streaming you can stream there from Streamyard, but it's through the RTMP destination and that's what we did when we were testing out streaming the the town hall there So, yeah, yes if you do have access you can stream there Hopefully in the future we'll have a more like tightly integrated Functionality with with tick tock, but right now it would just be through the RTMP.

Yeah, it is pretty limited So most people don't have access But if you do have access you can stream with custom RTMP

Absolutely Joshur says any improvements with X slash Periscope, I think it will be big soon.

So I think Twitter slash X has been doing more with live streaming.

So I'm hopeful that they will do things like add a comments API so it's easier for us to actually show the tweets that are happening on your X live stream, I guess I should say now instead of your Twitter live stream.

But I do see, like I saw Elon did a stream on there not so long ago testing things out.

So I'm hopeful that some new stuff will come over there.

Yeah, I'm really hoping they eventually expose the comments so we can actually show the Twitter or X comments in the studio.

AJ's green topic says, what is the best method to screen share with 1 computer?

I have to keep clicking on the tabs to switch.

I'd say it depends on what you're screen sharing.

If what you're screen sharing is say like a PDF, we do have the option to like upload a PDF or slides.

So I would recommend like that would be a good way to be able to access it directly within the studio and not have to switch tabs.

If that's not the case, and you're just sharing like your browser or something, unfortunately, it's sort of a, I would, you could try to split your current screen where it's like you have the studio on 1 half and you have the browser or whatever you're sharing on the other half.

best experience, I would probably, if that is how you need to do it, I would recommend investing in another monitor potentially.

Yeah, another way to do it is, if say you're sharing a bunch of websites, you know, Google Doc or Google Slides, a few other websites, you could have, you pull out all of those tabs you wanna share into a separate Chrome window.

So you have 1 Chrome window with StreamYard, 1 with all this other tabs.

And then you're basically screen sharing that Chrome application with all those other tabs.

You can switch between the tabs and you'll be sharing it the whole time.

It only works if all the things you're sharing are Chrome.

You can also share full screen, but then, so whatever you see, the users will see, but then obviously they'll also see StreamYard for a second or 2 before you switch to another tab.

Secondary and Modern is always the easiest.

That was 1 of the topics we had for tonight is For those of you that were at VidSummit, it was definitely our pleasure to get the chance to meet you in person.

It was really fun seeing some familiar faces.

And I see we have tons of other questions here, but I want to make sure we have time to talk about some of the new stuff.

So we'll get back to those in just a second.

But yeah, so the new feature that we wanted to announce for tonight is gifted memberships support, which has definitely been, has come up quite a bit.

I think Chantel in the chat, I think it's been an important 1 to you.

And for those of you who are unfamiliar with gifted memberships, basically what this is is on YouTube, if you have the memberships functionality, folks in your viewership, as a way to support, you can actually use this functionality called gifted memberships, which basically, like say they spend a few hundred dollars that results in a bunch of memberships that get distributed throughout the channel to like the most engaged folks and give them basically like, you know, a month of membership to that channel.

And previously, before we had this feature, you wouldn't really be able to see any of that on StreamYard.

Like all of that, you would see it on YouTube.

But as the host, you wouldn't see that someone had gifted memberships.

And I think we have a picture of it as well.

I think for any of you that are familiar with super chats and memberships and how those work within StreamYard, this is going to be very similar.

So if you get a gifted membership or somebody buys a membership, you'll see it kind of how you would expect within the chat.

Just another really cool way to be able to highlight someone who's contributing to your channel.

They are very similar to super stickers, super chat, memberships, nice addition.

And you can definitely show it on screen just like the others.

And we'll also auto-start just like we do for the super chats and everything like that.

Yeah, do you want me to show that picture on screen?

This isn't obviously what the feature itself is gonna look like, but just give you an idea.

So on the left there, that's roughly what the things in the chat will look like, where it would show you, hey, this person just gifted 1 membership and then all your other comments would be within there as well.

If you all have any questions about it or suggestions on how you'd like to see things change in the future with it, definitely let us know.

And then the other 1 I wanted to quickly mention before we get back to some of the questions here, which was announced last week, is obviously video backgrounds.

I've already seen quite a few comments about it.

So it sounds like folks are excited about it.

Dan and I actually are using 1 right now.

It's very subtle, but you can see the movement there.

But yeah, in case you missed the announcement, basically, it used to just be static, what you could upload in terms of the wallpaper or basically what sits behind the video elements of StreamYard.

And now you can actually upload videos, which is quite exciting.

And we also have some pretty cool examples that you can use to sort of see what maybe get some inspiration or just use them in your own streams.

Just, I guess, for anyone who's curious how you use the examples, just in case that's not obvious.

So like the 1 we have now, this green wave background is actually 1 of the samples.

So if you wanna use this exact same background, you can, no matter what plan you're on, even the free plan.

So if you're just in the studio, you go to the brand tab, there's the whole background section, and you just click to add a background.

Click to add a background and that's where you get this modal where you can either upload your own if you're on 1 of the paid plans or even on the free plan but all plans have it.

It just has a whole bunch of examples, both images and videos.

So if you've never tested that out before, there's definitely a lot of cool images and now videos in there.

You can select from like this green waves background.

I think there's about 10 videos and 10 images.

So yeah, if anyone has any thoughts, suggestions when it comes to video backgrounds, definitely let us know.

But it's been cool seeing folks using the new video backgrounds.

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

Let's Be Buds says, can you consider pop out chat like they have on YouTube?

It's something that we've had requested, not just when it comes to comments, but also when it comes to things like banners, brands.

So yeah, something that we've thought about in terms of how can we make that easier.

Don't have a date or anything, but it is something that we'd like to potentially support.

Hey, Shamprix, great to have you here tonight.

R Ballard Designs says, quick question, is there a way to add overlays and stuff without going into a broadcast?

So you do have to technically go into a broadcast, but it's not like you have to be live or schedule anything, right?

So what you can do is when you go to click create, you can just select the recording option.

And when you're in the recording option, everything that you set up there, you can set, you can like create brands and set everything up such that if you wanted to use that for a broadcast or your next recording, that it would work.

John Lacy says, says because it's custom RTMP on TikTok, you don't really see the live comments.

That's why it would be nice if TikTok does open up a more formal sort of API for us to integrate with.

We'd love to support that so that we can bring the comments into the studio.

Right now it's just the feed going into TikTok.

Again, like Dan mentioned, assuming you have access and most folks don't have access yet.

I see quite a few questions about things like scenes and like sequencing things from here, from things from like Ralph and other folks.

So 1 thing that I've alluded to is that there is something big happening in the background right now when it comes to custom layouts with the first iteration, if that helps with imagining what might be coming next.

Custom layouts was the first iteration towards, how can we keep things really, really simple?

But for folks that do really want to go deeper and make things feel like their own how can we give them that power while sort of keeping it under the hood for folks that just want the simplest experience possible and we're looking into how can we take that sort of same framework and add it to not just layouts, but make it where you can control all kinds of aspects of the stream.

So things like what you're mentioning, like how can you weave from an intro video to the next thing that's happening in the show.

So I think you'll be really excited with what we have planned.

So not ready yet, but I'm really, really excited to share it with all of you when it is available.

Rob says, can you add an iPhone as a second camera during live streams?

So the most common way that folks will do this is to simply just join as a guest from that iPhone.

So just by going to that StreamYard link, you can have that as another camera there.

And you'll definitely want to mute and stuff.

So you're not getting like, I mean, I guess it depends on the location and whether or not you actually want to have audio coming in from the iPhone, but yeah, you can just join in as a guest.

Would love to see 300 characters for banners instead of 200.

Basically, what is it you're trying to capture within a banner that you can't right now?

Like what kind of information are you trying to convey?

And also you probably know this already, but tickers you can make a lot longer.

If you really need to convey it, you can always put it in a ticker as well, or a custom overlay or something like that.

We just try to make it so there's not too much stuff on screen.

It can get a bit overwhelming if you put too many characters.

But open to increasing it a little bit if that's helpful.

Ross says, any tips or templates you recommend for creating your own video slash motion backgrounds?

And I'm sure there's probably folks in the chat that are pros when it comes to it.

So if anyone has anyone in the chat has recommendations or things that they use themselves for making them, I would love to I would love to read it and show them on on screen because it's definitely not my area of expertise.

I think the ones that we have in the product were made by our design team.

And you know what they use for that, Dan?

can't remember which Adobe product, but 1 of them.

We'll have to come up with some better docs and like recommendations, because It's a learning experience for Dan and I when it comes to making cool animations and stuff.

Yeah, I would just make sure, I mean my overall tip is make sure it loops because the backgrounds are going to loop automatically.

Like with this video background, there's no jarring change.

Like this is only I think a 20 second video or 30 second video when it finishes the last frame of the video is exactly the same as the first frame because it's just like this repeating sequence and that's I Can't really think of an exception for that Like maybe there'd be somewhere you wouldn't want it to loop perfectly like that But in almost every case you want your background to perfectly line up and loop.

Maryann says, any way the YouTube emojis show up as images and comments rather than text, I have to have the YouTube video chat on the side to see exactly what it is.

Definitely something that we've encountered ourselves.

That is something we're working on actually right now, right?

Dan is adding more support for the various types of custom YouTube emojis, right?

Mike says how big can the file be for the video background?

Yeah, I wish we got the exact number and I think it might be slightly different on our account than others, but that's why I didn't want to just reference.

Well, yeah, I believe it's 250 or 300 megabytes Come on, but now there's also 1 minute length limit as well.

So if Be curious like for anyone who's trying to know if anyone's ran into that limitation, if that's been a problem for you, if you want it to be longer.

Like we mentioned, you kind of want a really short, nice looping video.

You don't necessarily want something that has all kinds of stuff going on for minutes.

So yeah, we'd just be curious if any of you have ran into that pain point.

Or Same thing with file size, if the file size is a problem.

But with 1 minute, hopefully the file size shouldn't be a problem because a few hundred megabytes is pretty big for a 1 minute file.

This 1 was from a bit back about the gifting memberships feature.

So right now it shows, yeah, the gifter is specifically what it shows.

I don't actually think it shows the recipients right now.

I don't know if we've fully decided on that.

But yeah, most importantly, right now it shows the person that gifted, which I believe is what you're referring to as the gifter.

So the person who bought, let's say 10 memberships, it shows that comment on StreamYard and that's the thing you can show on screen.

And that's kind of the person you really want to shout out, right?

Internet, Madi says, is it possible that you don't automatically delete recordings on YouTube and storage included is used up, delete them to get more storage.

So I'm assuming, Madi, you're referring to the storage on StreamYard because YouTube doesn't, as far as I know, does not have a storage limit.

So you're never going to have to like delete videos on YouTube.

And you can absolutely like delete content, like say you want to free up storage on StreamYard that you've used, you can absolutely delete past streams that you've done on YouTube without deleting them on YouTube itself, just to delete, you can just delete the recording on StreamYard.

But if I misunderstood the question, do let me know.

Yep, and there's also a setting, If you have your storage limit on stream yard and you don't mind the older ones getting deleted when you create new content there's a setting in the team settings where you can You can turn it on and it basically says delete oldest recordings when new ones are created So you don't have to manually delete them ever But obviously be aware that they are gonna be deleted.

So if you have a specific recording, you don't wanna be deleted, then I probably wouldn't turn that on.

Andrina's Casa says, How are you getting the background to loop seamlessly?

So the main way we're doing that is just having it where the start of the video and the end of the video match up perfectly, right?

So the frame loops such that the final frame matches the beginning frame.

And it is pretty tricky to do, which is why we are providing a bunch of example backgrounds so that for a lot of you, you can just pick 1 of the example ones.

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