Multi streaming is quite simply streaming your content to multiple different platforms such as YouTube, Twitch and Facebook Gaming, simultaneously which in theory can expose your content to a much wider audience, and with a multitude of paid services popping up offering multi streaming solutions it’s easy to think this is a no brainer and the best way to stream!
A year ago, not many people turned down Twitch Affiliate, it was the dream to be able to monetise playing video games, however more recently, as more companies offer multi streaming services and with many big streamers leaving Twitch for other streaming services, whenever anyone asks in Twitch Groups “Should I become a Twitch Affiliate?”, there’s more and more people who respond with “No. You will lose the ability to multi stream.” and this is true, the Twitch affiliate contract does have an exclusively clause, meaning you can’t share any of your content with any other platform within 24 hours of broadcasting it on Twitch which is the end of your ability to multi-stream.
When I started streaming, I multi streamed to Twitch, YouTube Live and Facebook Gaming, but when the “Congratulations You Are Invited To Become A Twitch Affiliate” email dropped in my inbox I had a decision to make;
Is multi-streaming really all it’s cut out to be?
Becoming a successful streamer is much more than playing video games on camera, in fact hitting the go live button and playing a game is actually the easiest part. The more complicated part is creating a community and I think multi streaming actually makes this much much harder.
- Fragmented Advertising
When advertising your stream you need to cut through the billions of other “Come Watch Me Stream” adverts and the last thing that you need is to confuse your potential viewers by having too many options, it is much easier to say “I stream on twitch at 8:00 PM on Fridays” then it is to list a variety of different websites and URLs where they can come see you.
Added to this is many people prefer to view a channel that’s got more viewers so if on twitch you’ve only streaming to 2 viewers someone might not come in even though you’ve got 50 viewers on YouTube because they can’t see that you’ve really got 52 viewers. - Frustrated Viewers
If you have viewers on more than one platform at a time this will make your community chat much more fragmented, sure you can add on screen chat which will combine the chats from the different platforms into one place but not only can this make your overlays look very busy, it’s not actually where your viewers type and probably not where they are reading chat, so it’s still much much more difficult for them to interact and follow the flow which can be frustrating and the last thing you want is your community to be frustrated. - Lack Of Community Tools
Let’s not forget the excellent community building tools that are available to Twitch Affiliates, most of which revolve around the channel point system, where users can collect points for watching your stream which can be used for a multitude of rewards, or ways to mess with you as a streamer which gets them involved and makes them feel like they are a part of the stream, which helps build your community.
But That Doesn’t Mean You Should Ditch All But One Platform.
The key, I’m told, to becoming a successful streamer is not to drop other platforms, but to use these other platforms to funnel potential viewers into the place where you are streaming for example, If you stream on twitch, take your clips and your highlights, edit and polish them, and after the 24 hour exclusivity period has passed, post them onto YouTube, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and tell people if they want more of this sort of content they can find you streaming on Twitch and then give out your schedule.
After careful consideration, I decided Multi-Streaming was not the right solution for me and took Twitch Affiliate.
I’ve got a long way to go to be a “Successful Streamer” however, I don’t believe I could have got to where I am now without focusing on streaming on one platform.