- In this video, we're gonna run through exactly how to livestream
to multiple platforms at the same time or how to simulcast. Whether it's to YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch, or almost any other platform, we've got you covered in this video. (EDM music) Hey, it's Justin Brown
here from Primal Video where we help you amplify your business and brand with video. If you're new here, make sure you click that Subscribe button, and all the links to everything
we mentioned in this video, you can find linked in
the description box below. So let's jump into it. Now with some simple tools these days, it's really easy to livestream
to multiple platforms. In fact, there's even a name for it and it's called simulcasting. So that means you can
easily create one livestream and push it out to multiple live platforms or streaming sources like
Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Twitch, and a ton of
other platforms as well. Now we actually did a video on this topic a little while back, but since then so much has changed and it has now become so much
easier to be able to do this, so we thought it was
time to update that video and run through the new
best ways to do this or the new options to be able to do this. And what we're going through, I wanna hear from you guys what social or content
platforms are you most active on when it comes to livestreaming? We're gonna start to pick up our game a little bit on the YouTube
Live side of things, but we may look at other platforms too. Thanks to simulcasting. Now you've really got two main options when it comes to livestreaming
to multiple platforms. The first one is to push
out multiple streams from your broadcasting software. Now this is really possible in software like Vmix or like Wirecast where you're able to set
up multiple output sources. So instead of just sending
your livestream feed to YouTube, you're also able to
add in an additional stream for Facebook, or for Twitch, or wherever else you'd like to broadcast to. So, that's pretty much what
we covered the first time we tackled this, and I'll
put a link up to that video, because that method still does work. But, the biggest downside with that is that you're actually pushing
those multiple streams from your one computer and from
your one internet connection. Which means it can put
your computer under load, but it also put your internet
bandwidth under load. So, if you are going to be
pushing multiple streams, you'll need at least twice
the available bandwidth. Or, if you're running three
streams, you'll need three times the bandwidth that you
would for one stream, across each of the individual streams, to be able to push them all out. The other big downside of
multi-casting that way was the interactions, or the comments. They were all separate. There was no way to
pull them all together, so that you could bring in comments from YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook
all into one chat window. For you running the stream, to be able to monitor them in one place. You literally had to go to Facebook, and then over to Twitch,
and over to YouTube, to be able to see each one of those different comments and feeds. So while all of that was
doable, it was a pain to set up and it could be rather
frustrating to manage, and see everything while
you're actually live. But the option I'm about to show you now, option two, would require
no additional bandwidth, will put your computer
under no additional load, and you'll be able to use a larger range of livestreaming software or platforms to be able to do this. So what I'm talking about
here is a multicast, or simulcast platform that, you
send your livestream to them, and they push it out to the
different platforms for you. Now, there are quite a few
platforms out there that offer this service of re-broadcasting
and redistributing your content out for you. And in there, you've got a
massive range from super basic, right up to Enterprise grade. And obviously, the
Enterprise grade ones are gonna come with the Enterprise price tag. So there's really three main options when it comes to those of
us that are looking just to push our livestreams out
to multiple places without the need for Enterprise stuff. The three most popular, and my top three, are: Restream, Switchboard, and Castr. Now, all three of these
make it really simple to push your livestream
out to multiple sources at the same time. So, the all support things like, YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch, all the popular ones,
and they also have RTMP, so you can really push your livestream out to anywhere, using that RTMP protocol. They also all have integrated
comments, or integrated chat, meaning that no matter which services you're broadcasting to you
can pull in the chat to one central location
making it easy for you to either bring those comments
and those chat elements up on screen in your livestream, or just to make it easy for you to monitor and interact with people
while you're live. And all three of those
also have Global Servers, where you can manually
pick the fastest servers or the servers closest to
you, to re-broadcast out your livestream with the lowest latency. Meaning, it's not going to add a delay or a big delay to your
livestream for those watching on the different platforms. It's really going to be almost instant if you're picking a server
that is close to your location. Now, it's also important to note that Facebook Live is actually
treated a little different, it's treated separately from
pretty much all the other broadcasting platforms out there. And you'll see that when we
get to the pricing options of these services and
how they treat Facebook, but it's all to do with
the way that Facebook actually lets you broadcast live to them and in some of these
cases, you're gonna have to pay a little bit extra, or a lot more, to be able to broadcast to Facebook or to multiple Facebook locations. Now I'm gonna quickly run through some of the stand out pros and cons for each of these three, for Switchboard, for Restream, and for Castr, to help you better decide which one is going to be the pick for you. But, this really isn't
a full, comprehensive review or feature comparison of the three. This is just the standout
pros and cons as far as I'm concerned, to really help you narrow down which one of these is gonna be the best fit for you. Alright, so, Restream or Restream.io is probably the most popular and most people's go-to
platform for multi-casting, or getting their livestream
out to multiple places. It is by far the most
feature-rich, but it's also probably the most unintuitive, or the hardest to use. It's got the most advanced control in regards to the chat
or the comment feeds, and it's also got API integration, so it's really easy to
integrate that chat roll into your livestreaming software, like Wirecast and OBS. It also has built in live transcoding, which means that you
can transcode or convert your livestream into different formats, different
qualities, different sizes, while you're live, to
match different platforms you might be broadcasting live to. And another great feature is that Restream don't limit the amount of bandwidth or the bitrate, or the
quality of your livestreams going in or out of their service. They also make it really east to resize those different versions. So, if you're broadcasting
a widescreen video and you wanna convert it in Restream, so that your Facebook version
is going out in portrait, they make that really easy as well. There's really two main
downsides to Restream. The first one, I touched on already, it's around having all of these extra features, but the actual interface isn't super intuitive, or it's not easy to find everything
and it can get overwhelming and complicated, to go through and just create some simple Restreams. So it's really for probably the more advanced side of things. The second one is that
they add their branding to your livestreams, up until you reach their Pro Plan. So, on their Pro Plan, they'll let you remove their branding. And it's not just the branding inside of your livestreams, like a watermark on it, it's actually into your
social media streams as well. So in Restream you can set it up so that when you're live, it'll tweet out and maybe do a Facebook post out, but in there it's actually got their branding in it, it's got mentions of them and tags them in your posts. So, I think for anyone that's using this on the business side, you definitely don't want to have that going on which means that you're going to need to start at the Pro Plan. So, it's not a deal
breaker, but it just means that you've gotta be using that Pro Plan to get rid of all of that branding. Now, when it comes to pricing, they've split this off into two. So you've got individual pricing plans, and you've got company pricing plans. There is a Free Plan that lets you broadcast your stream
out to 30+ platforms, but that doesn't include Facebook. There's also a Standard
Plan at $16 per month, and that gives you access to livestream to one Facebook channel, and also gives you the ability, in real time, to switch or toggle between or, on or off the different livestreaming platforms. And then you've got the Professional Plan, which is $41 per month, this would give you access to
three Facebook channels, and also it takes the
branding off as well. Now, the transcoding that
I mentioned just before is an additional $2 per hour, for the length of your livestream. Now up from that, they do have Premium, Business, and Enterprise
plans av alible as well. This gives you access to
five Facebook channels on the Premium, and 15 Facebook channels on the Business. And obviously the Enterprise one is for those that are really crazy serious above and beyond that point. The next option you've got is Switchboard, or, Switchboard.Live Now, this is another
really awesome platform to be able to multicast
your livestreams out. They've got a really intuitive, really easy to use interface. It's so easy to quickly jump in, link up your channels,
your Facebook pages, and those sorts of things, and start to broadcast out from there. Once again, they've got really great chat integration, not quite to the level that you get in Restream, but still really solid, and still, they make it pretty easy to get into your livestreaming programs as well. And you've also got
transcoding capabilities again, to push the different versions
for different platforms. But one of the cool features that you've got inside of Switchboard is that for each one of the broadcasts that you have, or each one of the platforms
that you're broadcasting to, you can totally customize them up to have even individual branding. So, your Facebook Live stream could have different branding to
your YouTube Livestream, which has totally different branding to your Twitch livestream. So even while the content that you're broadcasting out from
your computer is the same, you've got a different version, or different logos, and
those sorts of things on each of them, all
managed through Switchboard. Even little things like, being able to bulk start and stop streams
and multiple streams is just so easy to do
inside of Switchboard. So they make a lot of this
stuff really, really easy. So now, in regards to the
downsides of Switchboard, I think most of these are really based around their pricing models, and the restrictions that come in at the different pricing models. First off, there's no free option, but there is a $99 per
month Professional Plan, and that's actually their
lowest, entry-level plan. They do have a 14-day trial available, but on that plan, your livestreams are going to be restricted to
five megabits per second and at a maximum resolution of 1080p. But they'll let you broadcast
out simultaneously to five providers, and two
of those include Facebook. Now, they also have restrictions around the duration of your livestreams and your multicasts as well. On that Professional
Plan, you're limited to 50 hours per month, and
12 hours per livestream. Now, depending on the
type and the amount of livestreaming that you're actually doing, none of those may come into effect, or may effect you too much. But they do have two other plans listed on their website for
Business and for Enterprise. But, neither one of them
has pricing available. So you're gonna need to reach out if you're interested in pricing for those, but obviously with those, a lot of those restrictions have been moved or raised. So now for the third option which was Castr or Castr.io Now this is probably the
new kid on the block, and it's actually probably the most compelling offer as well, and the one that I'm most excited about. There you go, just spoiled
the rest of the video for you. But this is the one that I think is going to be the
game-changer going forward, and could really have a impact on the other two options, moving forward. Now Castr, once again,
is really easy to use, but I think the biggest reason that Castr is super easy to use is that it's not filled with all the additional features and bells and whistles as the other two that we've seen. Now, there's no ads, there's no bandwidth limitations, and there's no stream time or limits on how long you can actually broadcast for. They even say on their website that you can stream 24/7 through their platform if you wanted to. Another big feature that Castr has is the ability to do cloud recording. So, you can actually
do a full recording of whatever it is you're livestreaming, without needing to save it
locally on your computer. Just like the other two, it does have integrated chat as well and they even show you on their website how to bring it into places like Wirecast. Now, what Castr doesn't have, straight out of the box, anyway, is those transcoding and reformatting options that you had in Restream and in Switchboard, but they do have another service offering that ties in with Castr, that does give you access to all of those things if you need them. So now, looking at the pricing options, I think this is really where Castr shines. They have a Free Plan with no branding, no watermarks, no restrictions around bandwidth or the amount of
time you can livestream for, totally free, that will let you share that out to five
publishing locations including one Facebook channel. They also have a $9.99 per month plan which gives you up to
10 publishing locations, and two Facebook channels. And for $29.99 you'll
get unlimited locations and five Facebook channels. Now, like I said at the start of the video, we're not getting into the nitty-gritty of each of
these three platforms. We are specifically looking at multicasting and broadcasting your livestream out to multiple platforms. These are, in my opinion,
the best three to do that. And you can also see that they're also completely different offerings. Now, if you're someone who's on the more advanced side of things and you're looking for all the features, all the controls, all
the bells and whistles, then you're really probably
not gonna be looking at Castr. You're gonna be more looking
at Restream or at Switchboard. Now, obviously, with those two, which one is going to
be the best fit for you, you've really gotta come back to those pricing tables and see
what the restrictions are and what you actually get access to for those different plans. But if you're someone who's not looking for all those advanced
features, and really wants the best bang for buck, to be able to get your broadcast out to multiple platforms, then
it's really gonna go hands-down to Castr. I really think that what they're offering, especially for the price, and even on the free plan is just insane. And it's, again, it's
easier to get up and running and get it working with
your livestreaming platform. So I'm gonna quickly log into Castr and show you how easy it is to get set up. Once you're logged in, all you need to do is go to add a stream,
and choose new restream. And pop-up on the side to
give your stream a name, let's just go with Test
1, and select your region. I'm in Australia now, so I'll pick Sydney, but choose the closest one to you. And press save. Next, all you need to do is to add in the platforms that you wanna broadcast to. So you come over here
and go add platform and these are all the supported platforms. So you can either choose a custom server, or pick one of the ones
that are preset in here. So let's just choose YouTube, now in this case you can
either connect your channel by signing into your YouTube
channel or you can use your own server or stream key that's provided in the platform. Once you've logged in and
it says YouTube is connected and it's saving, now this is where you can give your YouTube stream a title. Test Stream 1 Obviously, you wanna
come up with something a bit more creative. You can also add in your stream description in there as well and hit 'save' down at the bottom. So now that you've got YouTube in there, we can add in another platform as well, just going through the exact same process. So I'll back out of this now, and cancel that one. So you can queue up all of your different platforms in here, then all you need to all you
need to know here is this is your streaming details that you'll put into your
livestreaming software. Whether it's OBS, XSplit, Wirecast, Vmix, this is your streaming server and this is your streaming key. So, once you've set that
up in your application and started you livestream,
then your livestream will show up here, it
says Waiting for stream. So then, all you need to do is come over to your livestreaming software for this case we're going to use OBS. And we will go to settings, go to stream' and under ;tream type you'll want to choose custom streaming server. And this is where you'll paste in your server and your stream key. Hit okay and now, when we hit start streaming we'll
see it pop up over here, that our stream is coming through. And then you can toggle on and off the different providers
while you're actually live. Then, you can bring up your chat overlay, or the chat URL that you can visit to view and interact with the chat, that's also what you'll use to bring into Wirecast or OBS or you can sync your chat with Discord as well. So, now that you're all set up to livestream to multiple platforms with twice the potential audience, that's twice as important for you to nail your lighting and to get your lighting looking just right. Great segue, Justin. Linked on screen is video which is the Complete Lighting Tutorial to help you out with the
lighting in you videos. And the other video is
a video from YouTube. I dunno, could be good. Let me know! I'll see you soon.
