[Multi-Streaming] Beam.pro

[Marstead]

Hey everybody!

There's a new hip streaming service out there called beam.pro that is trying to specialize in minimizing stream delay (even moreso than Hitbox) and offering a sleek, modern take on Twitch (where Twitch has been sort of hacked-together to work the way it does now from the corpse of justin.tv). It's also going to be a default include in Microsoft products, especially in the future with the Xbox One.

I have no plans to swap to Beam at the moment--Twitch has all the Market Share, so it's Facebook versus Google+ all over again. However, I am able to multi-stream to beam.pro for free, like we used to try with Hitbox back in the day, so I'll be trying that starting this week.

The biggest problem with Hitbox multistreaming (aside from the abysmally low walk-in rate for the sorts of games we play on Twitch) was that it was unreasonable for me to keep track of both the Twitch & Hitbox chats and get people in both chats to talk to each other. Hitbox users generally hated Twitch and didn't want to be funneled into Twitch chat. Beam has a lot of services that make it really easy for their chat to talk to Twitch, so to speak. I've set up a Relay Bot through PiiqPiiq that sends messages from Twitch over to Beam's chat, and vice-versa. Here's how it looks currently (I'm able to customize the formatting on this, so if you think of a way for it to look less intrusive, let me know):

In-Stream Chat (What I See)

(A viewer in Beam types something in their chat)

Normal Twitch Chat

(A viewer in Beam types something in their chat)

Normal Beam Chat

(A viewer in Twitch types something in our chat)

I was actually able to get a Twitch account called BEAM_relay and a Beam account called TWITCH_relay. I figure this is less confusing than using PiiqPiiq as the bot conducting both of these relays.

We'll see how this goes over the course of the next few weeks. I expect Beam is more popular in the eSports field as we saw with Hitbox, but with folks like Microsoft looking to adopt it soon, and with how trivial it is to duplicate chat in both areas, it's definitely worth seeing if we get some extra exposure out of it.

If you have any ideas related to streaming on Beam feel free to hit me up!

-Dylan ("Marstead")

[Marstead]

I've received some great feedback about Beam so far!

Here are some clarifications about Beam, Twitch chat mirroring and general multi-streaming:

• Bot Commands Only Work in Twitch Chat: Twitch still has the most fully-featured bots, and while I can get regular chat messages to relay between Twitch & Beam, messages starting with ! will not make it across the relay on either side.
• !hide does not function in Beam: Messages prefixed with !hide in Twitch Chat won't make it over to Beam (the relay ignores !commands) and Beam users won't be able to use it either.
• You don't earn SP if you're only logged into Beam: You can watch on Beam and pop-out Twitch Chat, but even if you're actively chatting in Beam, if you're not signed into Twitch Chat PiiqPiiq has no way to assign you points.
• All links sent from Beam will be purged in Twitch: I don't have a way to discriminate between users sending links from Beam, so if any links are entered in Beam chat, they will be auto-purged in the Twitch relay.
• If you create a Beam account, there isn't a way to connect your Twitch account to it: Even if your Beam account has the same name as your Twitch account, the bot considers them separate entities and at this time there's not any way to connect them.

Reading all that, you might ask,  "If Beam sucks so bad with your current system, why bother multistreaming to it/relaying chat from it?" Here are my use cases for Beam--these are actually the same for YouTube Live, which I've been multi-streaming to for a little over a year:

• Increase Exposure: Beam has significantly fewer overall streamers so it is more likely for me to show up in their front page. Someone browsing who stumbles on a game they like might discover the channel through Beam when they might not on Twitch or YouTube. The hope is that they'll move over to Twitch (or at least Twitch Chat) if they decide they like the channel.
• Don't Immediately Exclude Non-Twitch Viewers: Getting people into Twitch chat was a big hurdle for Hitbox. I'd go back and check Hitbox chat after the fact and would occasionally see walk-ins irritated that I wasn't responding to their Hitbox messages and leaving. With YouTube I've avoided this problem by simply disabling YouTube's live chat -- a YouTube viewer who wants to chat is forced to see the link to Twitch chat in the stream description. The relay at least lets Beam viewers join the conversation right away and see that we have an active community. They might even ask some questions about the channel -- with the goal eventually being converting them over to Twitch, or at the very least Twitch chat use. And it guarantees an active chat environment once they join the Beam stream, instead of seeing an empty room.
• Twitch Failover: Even now that we routinely have Quality Options, sometimes Twitch doesn't want to work for specific viewers and they need another place to tune in for awhile. This is big when you're watching on a different device than normal. YouTube has been fulfilling this role for awhile, but beam.pro will give us another failover point. This also helps us to troubleshoot when we have connection issues (If the stream is working fine on YT/Beam, we know the issue must be with Twitch).
• Decreased Delay: In some circumstances it might be useful to have a low-delay alternate platform for some particular viewers. For example, it would be beneficial during a Sub Block where I am playing the game with the subscriber for the sub to see the short ~3-5 second delay over Twitch's ~12-15 second delay. Similarly, players who make it into the game in something like Jackbox might want to hop over to Beam while they are active in-round.

I'm still focused primarily on building my audience on Twitch, as that's where the majority of the video game streaming userbase (and my source of walk-ins) can be found.

As an existing viewer, the best possible thing you can do to help the stream grow is to continue watching on Twitch--it helps with Quality Options when the stream launches and bumps us up in game listings when we're live.

Multi-streaming to Beam here is to try to increase exposure to new viewers & walk-in traffic to Twitch. You're welcome to watch on Beam or YouTube instead of Twitch, but don't forget to pop-out Twitch Chat so you can still get full interaction with PiiqPiiq!

Thanks!

-Dylan ("Marstead")

[Marstead]

I've managed to ramp this up a little bit with exciting new features from Restream.io that let me seamlessly relay chat to & from all four (!) streaming services.

New Changes

• Reactivated hitbox.tv in Restream.io -- streams will once again also direct to hitbox.tv/marstead (now that we can reproduce chat there)
• Reactivated YouTube Live's chat (has been disabled)
• Created the following accounts:
• Twitch: chat_relay
• YouTube: chat relay
• Beam: chat_relay
• Hitbox: chat-relay
• Activated Restream's new chat bot. All chat from Twitch is now automatically relayed to YouTube Live, Hitbox, and Beam through the relay accounts indicated above.
• Chat from YouTube Live, Hitbox, & Beam will now appear in Twitch chat through the new "chat_relay" Twitch account.

Notes

• Commands still only work in Twitch chat, and you only earn SP in Twitch chat. You cannot use any commands--anything that starts with !--outside of Twitch chat.
• The chat_relay account is not allowed to post links in Twitch chat. If YT Live/HitBox/Beam users post any links, chat_relay will get purged.
• This is part of a wider to increase stream exposure as much as possible. I'm more comfortable multistreaming to more platforms when users of those platforms can immediately see and participate in the chat, without having to pop out a separate browser tab. 
• Before this relay system, I would often look at YT Live or HitBox chat and find people frustrated that I wasn't responding to them. That issue should now be resolved.
• The goal is to convert these folks over to Twitch eventually. And at at the tipping point where we have a large enough audience that this system could create problems, I plan to stop multistreaming altogether (I will likely have to agree to it as part of a Twitch partnership application).

Things to Look Out For

The walk-in rate from Beam, Hitbox, and YouTube Live are extremely low compared to Twitch, so I am not really worried about issues with the relay system right now. Based on our history with YouTube Live and Hitbox, since I'll be averaging 0-1 viewers on each of the three platforms I would be very surprised if we saw >4-5 people/platform/week sending chat messages from the other sites via the relay. If we get anywhere near that many people I'll consider the relay a huge success.

However, here are some thoughts about issues that could come up if we get a big spike in walk-in traffic for some reason:

• Viewers behaving badly in one of the other three environments will only need to be handled by mods in Twitch chat. If there is a spammer/scammer/problem viewer in one of the other environments, please just !ban Chat_Relay and shoot me a Discord DM. I'll clean up on the other platforms and unban Chat_Relay. Consider banning this account as a simple on/off switch for the relay, if things get out of control !banning it will turn it off temporarily.
• Twitch is the focus for the channel and so I am only planning to worry about moderation in Twitch Chat. If someone is being unruly in Beam for example I am not worried about banning them in Beam -- I'll just add them to the relay ignore list after the mods temporarily ban Chat_relay. If they persist I'll take care of actually banning them in Beam after the stream ends. This should not create extra work for mods (No one needs to monitor the other 3 environments, for example).
• If this becomes too unwieldy for me to keep track of (It adds 2 extra dashboards to update when we switch games) I may cease multi-streaming to Hitbox, but I plan to keep Beam & YouTube going for the foreseeable future.

Thanks everyone! If you run into any issues with Chat_relay or if you're concerned about a corner-case scenario where the relay could cause a problem on-stream, please reach out to me in Discord.

-Dylan ("Marstead")