- Live streaming
(tranquil ambient music) is one of the most powerful ways to create content and here at Think Media, we've seen dramatic results
growing our YouTube channel using the power of live streaming. And you've probably been looking and scouring the internet, trying to understand
how live streaming works and especially with
all the confusing gear, software and settings, I don't blame you. So in today's video, I'm gonna show you how to step-by-step easily set up a stream like
a pro using StreamYard. (swoosh) - [Narrator] You gotta just press record. - Hey, I'm Tony with Think Media and on this channel we do
tech tutorials, gear reviews and live streaming videos
just like this one, so if that's something you're
into, make sure to subscribe. Also down in the description below, you're gonna find all the
time codes for this video, so you can jump to a certain part if there's a question you have and you need to get that answered. And a big thanks to StreamYard which is a sponsor of this video. It's our number one solution
for streaming to YouTube and Facebook here at Think Media, it's the easiest way to have
professional-looking streams that are highly interactive, you can use it to bring on live guests or stream across multiple platforms, so if you wanna get started today, you can click the link in the
description to get $10 off, whatever plan's best for you. Now let's jump into StreamYard. So once you sign into
your StreamYard account, this is what it's gonna look like, you're gonna see on the
left-hand side here, we have a "Broadcast" tab, which is the one that's showing right now. And we have a "Destinations" tab and this is where you're gonna see all your different destinations
you want to stream in. For us, we have quite a few Facebook ones, we have a few YouTube ones as well. And this is where you're gonna
first add your destination, so you can click here "Add a destination". You can see you can do Facebook
pages, Facebook groups, Facebook profiles, LinkedIn,
YouTube, Periscope, Twitch, and even a Custom RTMP. Now this only comes with a
basic or the pro package, so if you're using the free one, you won't have this option here but it's a great option
if you need to stream to a custom place with
like a custom stream key or custom URL. And if you want a deeper dive on how to live stream to
YouTube using StreamYard, we did a dedicated video to this 'cause there's a couple
of settings you have to do inside of YouTube itself. And so if you wanna check
out that full deep dive, you can click on the card on the screen or check the link in
the description below. But I have all the
destinations I wanna add, so I'm gonna go back to
this broadcast tab here. You're gonna create a broadcast, and this is where you can select where you want to actually
livestream your video too. I'm gonna live stream into one
of our Facebook groups here, it's the "Video Ranking
Academy", "Members Only", and this is where you'd put a title, you can also put a description as well. And this little box is really important. If you want people to be
able to see their pictures when they comment on things, you can pull it onto the
screen of a livestream and you can show their comment, like if they ask you a question, this is a really important
thing to have checked because they can see
how to give StreamYard access to their Facebook, so they can see the little avatar, it creates a really engaging stream, so I just encourage you
guys to keep that checked. You can also schedule for later which is great if you're planning to go live a little bit later in the day, it's also a great way for Facebook to already be promoting your
live stream before you go live. And so I'm gonna leave this unchecked, but this is where you
would upload a thumbnail, put the start time and all of that stuff as well. Once you create the broadcast, you're gonna see it's
gonna pull up your webcam, hey, how you doing? You can also have some control here with muting your mic
before you enter the room which could be helpful if you're coming into a stream that's already going. You can also stop your cam here, you can see that you can
have a little avatar picture, you can edit that avatar, you can upload a photo if you want to. But for us we're gonna
leave the cam on here. And then you can also adjust your settings before you enter a livestream,
which is really important. So if you click on the
little settings wheel here, you can see where you
can select your camera, which is right here, the
C922 Pro Stream Webcam, that's the one I'm using. But there's all those different softwares and capture card things you can do as well within StreamYard. And if you click on this "Show Advanced", you're gonna see camera resolution. This is really important to make your stream really look great and make sure your webcam looks great is always if you can select 1080p, especially if you have a
decent internet connection, it's just gonna make it a better stream, it's gonna look clear as well. Going over to the audio settings, you can see where you can
select your microphone, for me I'm using the Yeti X right now. And you can see even the levels that are coming up right here, and you can see kind of
what you're looking at. You just make sure that you're not, don't wanna be on the
like full all the time, if you kinda peak there once in a while, that's totally fine. But you can see a quick representation of how your mic is sounding. This is also where you select the speaker of where you want your
audio to come through, your guests audio to come through really, and you can even test it right here to make sure you have
the right thing selected. Underneath here, this echo cancellation is a really, really great
feature that StreamYard has. This helps to make sure that if you are playing back
a guest through a speaker, that is not coming back through
your microphone and echoing. I don't know if you guys have ever experienced that,
(chuckles) but it's pretty distracting in a stream and so this is a great
thing to keep checked. Unless maybe you have headphones on or maybe some in-ear monitors. So if you uncheck it, you also get the option for stereo audio. Now this is great if maybe
you have a music stream or you need, there's some
kind of reason you need the left and right stereo
experience for people, and so that's just a great option that StreamYard has there for you, if you're doing like a
music stream or whatnot, but for me I'm gonna leave the
echo cancellation on for now because it's just a normal livestream. The next setting I really love is this "Automatically Adjust Mic Volume". If you check this, you don't
really get any options, but if you uncheck it, you can see here it's in beta right now, but you can adjust your mic volume custom right here within the browser, within the settings, which is so important for having a consistent sounding stream and to really take it to the next level. The last setting we have
here is for green screens. Now I don't personally have a green screen or a blue screen behind me but if you do, this is
a great spot to come and swap out your background. You can see here under
this "Virtual backgrounds" that there's a break option here, there's this kind of
like cool looking house and you can even upload
your own backdrops. Then you would just select
what color you have behind you, whether it's green or blue, and you can even fade it up and kinda play with the setting, I mean, it looks a little weird on me 'cause I don't have a
green or blue screen, but you can kinda play with it there to dial in the perfect
green screen setting. Once you have all your settings dialed, you can enter the broadcast studio and it's gonna bring you
to a window like this. Now that I'm here in the broadcast studio, I'm gonna hover over my
little thumbnail down here and click "Add to Stream", so you can see me on the big screen here, hey, how you doing, again? And we are going to look at the tools that we have here on the
right side of the screen and what you could possibly
use them for as well. The first tool here is "Comments". Now this is where you're gonna see your livestream chat pop up as
people are watching your stream. You can also click on those messages and add them to your overlay so people watching can see them, you can interact with them, maybe they have a great question, maybe they're complimenting you on how amazing your stream
looks after watching this video, and (chuckles)
they wanna let you know. And so you wanna click on those
to put those on the screen and then you click on them to take them off the screen as well, such a great tool, super useful. The next one here is "Banners". Now we love using banners
here at Think Media because it's a great way to
ask your audience a question. It's also a great way to
give a call to action. Well maybe you want
them to go click a link, maybe you want them to
go check out your course, your video, anything like that, and the best way to do it is
you can just type it in here and then what you click on is "Show", and you can see right here, like "what was your
aha moment from today?" We'll ask that on a lot of our streams and just to get some
engagement in the comments. The other things we'll
do, like I said earlier, is give call to action. So "wanna learn how to
grow on YouTube this year, watch our free YouTube web class here @thinkmasterclass.com". So just a couple of ways
you can use this banner. It's also a great way to
maybe if you're teaching, you can add points. So I've done it before, I've been like number one, set up videos, number two, answer a
problem with a product. So it's just a great
way to give a visual aid to what you're talking about
natively within StreamYard. The next tab here is our "Brand" tab. What's great about this is you can create a brand look or a brand feel and it's saved within StreamYard across all of your streams. So for us, we had a brand
color here that we put in and we picked, and this color shows up on the banners, onscreen comments and display names. And so that's just a great
way to brand those things with a certain color. You can also put a logo here, as you can see this one
right here will show if you have the free plan is going to be always
watermarked there on the top, but we have our own custom ones, whether it's a black think logo or a white think logo. And it's just a great
way to brand your stream because here's the thing when you have a stream, a lot of times what we'll do
here is we'll cut that out and put micro content on it. And now because that logo is right here, you can actually see that even
when you take clips out of it and you post it on
Facebook or on Instagram, you're gonna see that logo and it's gonna help brand
your different clips that you're gonna pull
from your livestream. The next section under
here is the overlays. Now you can see right here that StreamYard provides a couple of overlays, You can put, you know, live
with StreamYard right here and StreamYard live show. We haven't really utilized this much, but it's also the way you
would put images on the screen. So if you can see here
we were talking about Heather Torres on our
team is building an RV, so there's an RV picture in here she was using as a visual aid. And that's just the way
that you're gonna put images baked into StreamYard is
through this overlay function. And so it's really important that you make them widescreen if you can, if you notice here this
actually just covers me, so there's actually still stuff behind. So do your best to use
kind of widescreen images 'cause then they'll take up
the full width of the screen. The next section here is "Video Clips" and we love to use this
in a few different ways. We like to have a pre-stream
countdown timer in there, we love to run ads in there, or even just video clips
in a teaching illustration. We'll most of the time
upload into StreamYard to make sure that it's
just a smooth experience and the video plays back great. Now there's a couple limitations that you've got gotta be aware of at the time of recording this video. You can see here if you
hover over this question mark that the max video length is five minutes, max file size is a hundred megabytes and it recommends that
you have a 720p video, and so just make sure to
follow those requirements and then StreamYard will accept your video and you'll be able to play
it on your live streams. My pro tip for you here is especially when you're on Facebook is to use a livestream countdown timer. It's so great because it gives people time to get into the livestream, So you're not just
starting with nobody there. And so I really highly recommend that you upload one in
here into StreamYard and you're able to use it
with your live streams. Now, if you're already
going, I'm overwhelmed Tony, I don't remember all this stuff, how am I going to remember all this stuff when I set up a livestream? Well, you can actually pop
down into the description below and we actually have a live
streaming checklist for you that you can use every
time you're gonna go live to make sure that your
camera's looking great, your audio sounding great and you have everything you
need for your livestream before you hit that go live button. The next section here is our backgrounds. This is another area you can
upload custom backgrounds, and you can kinda see here that you can have different kinds, you can have the leaves, here I'm taking myself off here so you can see you can
have the leaves background, you have a black background. We uploaded this blue
one 'cause we felt like it was just kind of the best background that we could use that
wasn't super distracting, but gave it a little bit of depth. Where you're really
gonna see these backdrops is when you have a guest in here with you as you're interviewing somebody or if you're sharing your screen. So I'll show you what
that looks like right now when you share your screen, and I'm gonna select this Facebook thing and you can see this backdrop will pop up around my webcam here as well as behind the
screen that I'm sharing. The last option here is you have a quick toggle
for showing display names or not showing display names on you or the guests that you have on the stream. The next tab here on the
left side is "Private Chat". Now when you click into here, it's actually a spot you can have a private chat with the people that are
on StreamYard with you, you can kinda just type in here and hit enter. We use this on our live streams if we need to communicate with each other while things are live without
having to talk to each other. But also it's a great way if you have guests coming into StreamYard and maybe you're doing like a Q&A, you actually talk to them ahead of time or have somebody else in
the backend talking to them, asking what their question is and letting them know when they're coming up on the livestream so they're fully prepared. The last tab over here is "Settings". Now you might be like, Tony we just went over settings
like a few minutes ago. Well, there's another
tab that opens up here when you're inside of
the broadcast studio, it's general settings. And you'll see here that there's a broadcast
quality selection. Now, if you don't have a
professional plan right now, you can't do 1080p, but it's just a great way to make sure if you do have that professional plan, how to get to that 1080p quality. You also have some little settings like you can shift videos
up for comments and banners, which basically means when
a comment goes on the screen or you put a banner, it kind of shifts things up to make it more readable for your viewers. So I highly recommend
keeping that checked on and your audio avatars are
what we looked at earlier, where you have a picture of
you instead of your web camera, instead of your video, you can enable or disable
those here in this setting. Now before I jump into
these last couple of things you have to know about StreamYard, make sure to let me know
in the comments down below, do you have any questions
about StreamYard? I'd love to be able to jump in there and answer anything you might be wondering about the different plans they have or how to use it best when
you're live streaming. One of the things we
love about StreamYard is how easy it is to run
when you're actually live. Now what I mean by that is how you can change scenes
between a screen share, then maybe you want to go fifty-fifty with you and your guests, then maybe you want the
guest to be full screen, you can do that all in StreamYard with one click of a button. You can see all the different logos that are right underneath
this video right now. And I'm gonna walk you through
what each of those does. The first one gives you
a full screen person, just like you're seeing now and just like how the logo looks. The second one is actually gonna put you and your guest fifty-fifty,
right down the middle. Okay, so it's gonna fill the screen, it might have to crop in a little bit if you're shooting on a webcam like this, but this is a great option if you have somebody coming
in from their cell phone and it's a vertical phone, you can actually see it full screen, fifty-fifty like that, and so that's a great option. The other great option for another guest is if you have two people
on webcams like this, is the one that's right next to it. This puts people side by side so they can both see each other, you can see the names, it also gives some room
underneath the videos to put any banners you wanna put up, or maybe some comments from the viewers. It's a great layout, it's one of our favorites that
we use here on Think Media. You also have the next one which if you have like three guests, you can have one person be highlighted and have two people smaller, so maybe you're doing like
a panel live streaming, you have multiple people talking, you wanna highlight and
focus on one person, but also see the reactions of the other people on the stream, this is a great layout for that. The next one is a screen share option, you can have yourself be big like this and your screen little, so if you have like a big
slide or maybe you have like something you just wanna quote, you wanna share with people, this is a great layout for
that because the screen is huge and because you don't need it to be, and it also keeps the
engagement on the video on you while you're sharing your screen. The next one is the one I showed earlier is you can have a screen share
with you on the side small. Now if we had multiple guests here, it actually stacks us up on this left side of the screen here. So you can see multiple people while you're sharing your screen. The next one here and the last one is a
full screen screen share. Full screen screen share, I think that makes sense. But basically you can
look at your screen full. If you're also tryna play
a video from a screen, it's actually a great layout for that, so if you're tryna show like, oh, look at this video online, you can just do a full
screen reveal of it, but I'm gonna click back
to the full screen now, so you can see me, hey, I'm back. And so that's the best way
to navigate your stream live. Those buttons are gonna
be where your mouse lives when you're live, okay. You can just control your
different angles really easy, one click of a button, again other streaming softwares make this a lot more difficult, that's what I love about StreamYard is it makes it really easy to
have a high quality stream. In addition to those scene
controls underneath that, you can see where you would mute your mic, you can see where you can
stop your cam down here. You also have that same camera and microphone settings that you saw when we came into the broadcast studio, so if you wanna change
some of those things once you got into the room, you can do so. So this is also the place where
you will share your screen. So I have my screen share right here, but if I stop my screen share, you can see I click here and it gives me options. Now what I love about StreamYard too is that you can actually share your audio from your computer, so you're tryna to play a video, the people that are watching
can hear the audio with it. You can also just do
an application window. You can do different, you have different internet browsers or you have different softwares, you can just share from
those softwares directly. And then also what's
great is this Chrome tab. This is the one that I
probably use the most because a lot of times I
just wanna share one tab that I'm trying to show something off on, so I'll just click this Chrome tab and I'll click maybe this
Facebook thing like I did earlier. And then you can click
share audio here as well to like share if there's
like a video audio or any kind of music. And you can just click share, boom, pops right up. And you can see right there that my screen share comes right
(snaps fingers) into the screen as soon as I share it. The last option here is invite people. This is how you're gonna invite guests. Now if you click on the invite button, you'll see right here
that there is a link here. You can have up to 10
people on screen at once, I believe that changes depending
on what package you have, you can even send a Gmail email, an email or a messenger, and it will give some instructions
as well for the guests to know how to best utilize
being on a livestream with you. And you just copy this link,
copy it to the clipboard and you can send it. That's also what we put in our chat when we want people for Q&A to come in. That's the link we'll drop, and so people can come and you can see them in the back end here, kind of by down here where my, look this way down here, where my little thumbnail is down here, they'll show up more people back there and then you can bring them
onto the stream one by one. And when you're ready
to start your stream, you can actually click on the "Go Live" button on the top right, and it'll instantly send it out to the different destinations
you already selected earlier in this process. But I wanna give you three tips for doing maybe your first livestream, or maybe you've been doing
them for a little bit, and this will just help
you upgrade your stream and make it even better. The first tip I have for you is to share your screen before the stream. Let me explain why. So when I share my screen
here in StreamYard, and I go to this Chrome tab and select it, it instantly puts it onto the screen. Like it instantly puts
it onto the livestream. So if I'm already live, if I wanted to like make
sure to bring it up, it instantly goes out. Now you might want that
in some circumstances, but I personally prefer
having control over when it actually goes to the livestream. So if you see like this and share your screen like I did just now, before you go live, you can actually hover
over the screen down here and click "Remove". Now it's not on the screen, but it's still here in the
backstage of StreamYard, so I can bring it up whenever I want, I have more control over when people are seeing my screen share. The second tip I have for you is something I mentioned
earlier in this video, but make sure to have
your comment tab open when you're live streaming. This is a great way to see
who's in your livestream chat and how you can engage with them, maybe there's a great question in there. maybe there's a great comment in there that you can engage with, you can bring it on the screen and make people feel like
they're apart of your livestream, apart of your show. The next tip I have for you is to make sure you have a
countdown before you go live, especially on Facebook. Facebook, it's so important
to give people time to get into your stream, it's a great way to build anticipation and gather your audience before you officially
start your livestream. - Thank you so much for watching. If you wanna check out that
StreamYard to YouTube video, you can click or tap on the screen, or if you wanna check out some of our best cheap webcams
to use for live streaming, you can click on the screen as well. And I'll see you in the next video.
