We've got an AWESOME update to announce that'll make your content WAY more dynamic. Come hang out 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 247 of the StreamYard Live Town Hall.

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

For those of you watching, this is actually the first town hall where Dan and I are not actually live with you right now.

We had some folks coming into town and we're actually at an event right now that we can't step away from, unfortunately.

But we do have some really exciting announcements tonight regardless.

And the second half of this will actually be live.

We have some co-hosts coming in that will answer your questions on the new features.

And for anyone who's brand new here, Dan and I are the founders of StreamYard and 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 for 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 or it'll be our co-hosts tonight will also watch the chat afterwards.

Feel free to leave it in the chat and the team will 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.

Before I forget, we have lots of awesome shows on StreamYard.

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

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

Both of them are pros when it comes to all things video, all things YouTube, and they give very specific feedback on individual channels, which I think can sort of spark your imagination on what could work for your own channel.

Then we 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 live streaming 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, what's the strangest sport you've ever played?

The 1 that actually came to mind for me, I don't know, strange, Maybe not the right word, but I would guess most people have never played it or even heard of it.

Like if you looked at it, you would think it basically was hockey, but it's a very different type of stick.

It's just a totally different type of hockey, but you can do all kinds of cool dekes within the stuff because the stick is shaped quite differently.

So yeah, it is pretty unique, odd sport, but in Canada, even that gets played quite a bit, not nearly as much as hockey, but we also play quite a bit of that.

Yeah, for me, as a kid, there's definitely quite a few weird ones that I don't remember all that well.

The 1 that does come to mind that I remember playing a lot in the summers was something called wall ball.

I don't remember the exact rules of it, but basically you would throw tennis balls at like a brick wall and there was some weird rule where if the other party got a point you would actually throw the tennis ball at the other person.

It was Definitely a strange game, but it was popular back then for some reason.

Cool, so yeah, jumping into it, the first new feature for tonight, really excited about this 1.

It's been asked for a very, very long time.

And you might be able to guess what it is, because as you may have noticed, we actually started with a different background for tonight to sort of demonstrate the feature.

So that new feature is video backgrounds.

Do you want to talk a little bit more, Dan, about how this works and what people can expect?

So this is specifically when we say backgrounds, we're referring to the background, the background and the area around us.

So we've considered adding video backgrounds for virtual backgrounds as well.

And that may come in the future, but this is specifically referring to kind of like the wallpaper area of the whole stream.

So exactly like this blue effect that Gage and I have going on, which is super cool.

It spices up your stream, kind of makes it more visually appealing, especially if you're using a background that's like a little subtle, but just adds a bit of kind of professional quality to it.

So what I think is really cool about this launch is we have a whole bunch of example backgrounds.

So we're not just kind of asking you to upload your own video and sort of hope for the best.

So actually this blue 1 we have going on, this is gonna be 1 of them that's included.

We've got, I'll just play through a few of them and maybe even switch it out throughout the show here.

So we've got a green 1, very similar to a bunch of others I'm not even gonna show.

I'm just giving like a rough overview of some examples.

It's a nice orange 1, like very kind of subtle, subtle effects.

It's 1 particle kind of floating around and they're all quite subtle, but just add like a nice, nice touch to the stream.

It was a pretty, pretty funky 1 with some files kind of twisting around.

And in terms of plans, because I'm sure that question is going to come up.

So this feature is to upload a background is on all of the paid plans in the same way that uploading backgrounds has always been.

But as part of this change, we're also adding all the example backgrounds to the free plan.

So in the past, actually, there was 1 example background you got on the free plan, But now you'll have access to all of these example video backgrounds and actually a bunch of example image backgrounds as well.

So if you're on the free plan, you get access to a whole bunch of example backgrounds and all the ones I just showed here, which are pretty cool.

But if you do want to upload 1, you still have to upgrade for that.

So if you're on any of the paid plans, you can upgrade your own background as well.

And of course you can also use images still, that hasn't changed at all, but a lot more powerful with videos.

Awesome, yeah, we're really excited to start using these.

If you have any feedback or questions, definitely let us know in the chat.

And we'll have Noah and Kelsey jumping on in a second here.

They'd be happy to answer any of your questions.

The other 1 we wanted to walk through in case you missed it, was custom registration fields, which is a feature specifically for StreamYard OnAir.

If you haven't heard of StreamYard OnAir before, it's basically StreamYard's webinar solution or private live streaming solution.

So if, Say, for example, you built this awesome audience on YouTube or Facebook, and you now maybe want to have a more private setting, like a webinar, OnAir is the solution for you.

And the reason why stuff like custom registration is cool is it allows you to collect more information from those folks.

Say you have a course to sell them, or you want to be able to contact them through through email this is a great way to do some sort of webinar or event and be able to collect that information and yeah and specifically with custom registration fields you

bit more Dan about what that sort of unlocks for folks.

Yeah, let me keep switching through some cool backgrounds as well.

So it's a lot of kind of the fields I think you would expect.

So it's things like phone number and any sort of, I mean, it's not like you can literally do anything, but you can do a lot.

So if you wanted to ask just a text question, you know, how did you hear about us, for example, and they can just answer with typing out some text.

So you can have a dropdown that says some kind of question, you know, do you like cats or dogs and then the dropdown, you put whatever options you want people to be able to choose.

You can have a checkbox, so just some kind of yes, no answer.

Basically gives you a lot of flexibility.

I find it's very quick and easy to use, so you can ask custom questions super fast.

Like it literally takes 5 seconds to add.

Like say you wanna ask for a phone number, it takes 5 seconds to just click, I wanna ask for phone numbers.

Cool, and then 1 final 1 that was announced last week, but in case you missed it, was posting trimmed videos to LinkedIn.

So this works pretty much exactly the same as the feature we launched a while back in terms of being able to post longer form videos to platforms like YouTube.

So now after you've done your recording or your live stream, using the StreamYard editor, you can actually pick out segments that you like to actually turn that into a full-length video for a platform like LinkedIn.

So, so far, we've gotten really good feedback about it from folks.

But if there's any additional feedback any of you have or requests, definitely let us know in the chat.

And yeah, on that note, I think we're going to pass it along to Noah and Kelsey from the StreamYard team who will be here live to answer any of the questions on these features.

Dan and I will be back next week, not pre-recorded, we will be fully live next week here with you.

And we will likely have some other exciting stuff to announce then as well.

He had to step out as well and I am replacing him today.

And hi everyone, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Kelsey.

I work at StreamYard as the head of production.

And Joanne is in our marketing department.

Joanne, I know you were brought in last minute.

I'm also obviously not usually hosting the town hall.

So for those of you who are with us live, thanks for bearing with us with this kind of new concept that we're doing this week.

Before we do that, I want to just ask you, Joanne, what was the strangest sport you've ever played?

Because Gage and Dan asked that fun fact in their recording.

He used a giant wiffle ball with a broom on ice, and you had to wear socks over your tennis shoes.

That definitely qualifies as a strange sport.

But my version of wall ball that I grew up with was with big kind of rubber bouncy balls that we would like hit like this against the wall and then it would bounce back and That was all the rage in elementary school, right?

Cool, so I know A big new feature was just announced, video backgrounds.

We are so excited to be launching these super soon.

So I know we already have a few questions going, so let's jump into them.

I have a few here that I was starring during the video that came up.

John asks, is there a capability to be able to run footage in the background, like a movie?

So the video background will automatically loop.

So it can't be like a whole two-hour long movie that just plays behind you, it does have to be a shorter clip that will automatically loop in the system.

And we did want to mention, too, that with the looping feature, you might want to keep in mind to choose a video that has a similar end and start so that when it does loop back, it looks pretty clean in your video.

And then a lot of people were asking about facts and the facts for sizes.

And the file size can be up to 200 megabytes.

Yeah, I mentioned file length can be up to a minute.

So we're only doing MP4 videos similar to the video clips section for those video backgrounds.

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

I know there's a lot of questions on specs there.

Another question here, and I think we have more about video clips, but I wanted to just address this 1, why is Facebook giving us copyright strikes for the 30-second countdown?

If you're getting copyright strikes for the built-in 30-second countdown timer that lives in your StreamYard account, that should not be happening.

So you might want to try and appeal that with your Facebook account.

But if you're using another type of 30-second countdown timer that does have copyright music on it, then that might be why.

Joanne, are you seeing any other questions?

So the feature will be available for video backgrounds this coming week.

So rolling out in the middle of the week.

So by the end of the week, all users should have that on your studio.

And yeah, Happy Valley Hobbies, that is a puddle scarf in the background.

Someone else had a question about the free version.

Are there any upgrades for the free version?

So in terms of the video backgrounds, you do have access to video backgrounds because we provide a few kind of like stock ones inside the StreamYard Studio.

And those ones are available on the free plan.

I think you also saw these in the pre-recorded video, but there's a blue background that I'm clicking on.

So you'll be able to explore these within your free account.

The difference between the free plan and the upgraded plan is that on the upgraded plan, you can also upload your own custom video backgrounds in addition to these, these built in ones.

We'll definitely consider raising that limitation if that becomes an issue.

But in the testing of it, I actually didn't find that 200 megabytes was too constricting, especially because the length of the video is capped at a minute.

Bagel Gatening says, will we ever be able to show live chat on screen without having to manually put them on screen?

I'm actually not sure, but we can put that piece of feedback in with our team to consider that.

I think most users prefer to have that customization of not necessarily putting every single comment on screen and having that control.

You want to be able to answer the questions when you want.

Is it a new feature being able to play a video, then come on live after?

Or was this just a video you played before coming on?

I think that's in relation to the prerecorded video.

Yeah, so that was just uploaded to our video clip section.

And then we played it at the top of the show.

What about video backgrounds onto a green screen?

And the dev team is definitely taking that into consideration.

But right now, as a virtual background, it's not available.

I appreciate everyone putting your hashtags in the chat.

And we'll show you what that is in a bit.

What is the diff between a GIF background and a video background?

So I was just going to say, I believe GIF is capped at a shorter length, right?

So a video background allows you to have a longer video playing before it loops.

Is that right, Joanne, your understanding too?

So with the video backgrounds, it's an MP4 that you can upload, and a GIF is a GIF.

So yeah, it's definitely a little different.

Work around to having animated lower third branding.

So if I understand your question correctly, you're not able to resize backgrounds within the StreamYard platform.

If you wanted to have an animated lower third, you might be able to do that by creating that in an outside editing software, like a transparent GIF, and then bringing that into the video clips section inside StreamYard.

But you can't do that editing within the platform at the moment.

Oh, will there be a hot key for selecting the video backgrounds?

Joanne, do you know the answer to this 1?

I do not know, but I'm pretty sure it's something we can just request.

OK, We're going to take a few more questions.

And then we're going to get into a little interview with Joanne, because I want people who don't know you super well to kind of get to know you.

Gage and Dan have been doing employee, Streamline employee interviews for the last several episodes.

And I understand, Joanne, you did 1 a while ago, right?

JOANNE WHITEHILL-KLEINCKEN Yeah, it's been a while.

So it's due time for our newer users to get to know the great Joanne Watt.

International Asphalt Junkie says, how many cameras can I add to my streams and how?

So if you're on our professional or above paid plans, we have a feature called Extra Camera, which allows you to connect your main webcam or camera.

And it also allows you to connect a second webcam or camera to your stream without a second audio source.

So it makes having multiple cameras super seamless and easy.

So that's an easy way to have an extra camera.

And then if you want to, you can also just connect multiple devices into the same studio and have all those cameras on you at the same time.

So I guess the limit could just be 10 cameras of you on screen at the same time.

But it would have to be 10 separate devices if you were doing it that way.

But if you're interested in an extra camera I would recommend checking out the upgraded Pro plan because that allows you to easily connect that second camera.

Okay let's move into the quick interview Joanne and these these questions are kind of rapid-fire because there's a few of them.

All right, first thing, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at StreamYard?

And I'm the market Manager at StreamYard.

So we do everything from the paid ads to social media to some of the content that you see on our website.

We just want people to know how awesome the platform is.

And we do event sponsorships for going to VidSummit tomorrow.

So if you are going to be at VidSummit, I know I was going to mention at the end, but I'm just too excited because it's on my brain.

We're going to be on the fourth floor booth number 8.

If any of you are going to, that's kind of a tongue twister.

If any of you are going to VidSummit, make sure to check us out.

I went to the VidSummit that we went to, I think, 2021.

So the second question was where are you located, but you're in Wyoming.

What is your favorite stream yard feature?

Cause I really love calls to action, giving people something visually to see.

That's a great answer, because banners make, they help your stream stay visually dynamic.

You know, when you're adding, same with comments.

Like I love putting up comments on screen because it's like something else to look at.

CallMeProperty says, wish I was going to VidSummit.

Will we ever be able to show live chat on screen without having to manually put them on screen? 

How many cameras can I add to my streams and how?

Tell me more about the new feature that is announced

describe all the questions asked along with their answers

 Why is Facebook giving us copyright strikes for the 30-second countdown?

what are the questions that users have asked

What about video backgrounds onto a green screen? Can we do that? 

See all StreamYard transcripts on Youtube

Ask StreamYard: New Feature To Make Your Streams Stand Out! (#247)