How to stream?

Have you ever wanted to share your gameplay? 

Have you ever wanted to share in front of a live audience?

Well, brace yourselves, because Twitch/ Youtube livestreaming is here!

Since 2012 I have been working as a teacher. Being confortable with talking in front of a crowd, I started venturing into the depths of the internet, in order to find a way to connect my two biggest passions in life, teaching and gaming. So, I created a channel named TheGamerTeacher ( a bit cheesy but its catchy ). In the first few days and weeks I had a lot, and I mean A LOT of questions. Technical issues, settings, content, behaviour, marketing, etc. In this article, I will try to explain some of the issues I had and resolved. 

• Technical requirements. You really need to pay attention to this at first. You need a good internet upload speed of at least 3Mb/s and a semi-good PC. I am talking about a good CPU mainly because 80% of the work is done by it. For example a i3 of the 5-6 intel generation should be enough for starters. A good microphone and a webcam are optional but they make the stream better for the viewers.
• Settings. First you will need software to actually stream your content. OBS is widely considered as the best free option, but Xsplit and others do tend to be a viable options. Even the Nvidia Experience ( for Nvidia GPUs users) is an OK thing to start with. There are a lot of videos of the settings inside the OBS and even the software developers have their own "How to setup the stream" guides, so just try out one of the guides. One of the basic things are:
  -Bitrate: it depends on what resolution you want to stream but just as a guideline 720P 2000-2500 bitrate and for 1080p 3000-3500 should do it. Just don't go over 3500 if you are starting. I was streaming with a high ammount of bitrate and I actually was able to spend almost 2000 GB of internet.
• Content, behavior.  Not everyone is going to make it in livestreaming. Not everyone will start earning money. In fact only 1-2% of the streamers are actually full time streamers that live off of streaming. There are few simple things that determine if you succeed in this bussiness or not:
  - If you do it since the beggining of Justin.tv (nowadays called Twitch.tv)
  - If you are a god in a game ( just check out the channels of AdmiralBulldog , an international championship winner in Dota 2, or shroud , a great CSGO player)
  - If you stand out from the crowd ( DrDissRespect streaming PUBG)
  - If you have bewbs ( this is just a joke amongst streamers which I will explain in the marketing section)
• Marketing. Imagine this: you have a cure for cancer, world hunger, peace or whatever, but not a single person in the world knows this. Will you be able to help someone? Not really. So , you may be the best at doing everything right, but spreading word of your actual channel (which is by the way your brand, so I will reffer to it as such) is actually a key to growing. As many people should be aware of your brand. Setting up a steady schedule actually helps a lot, setting up brand profiles on every single social media possible ( and I do mean every single one, not just Facebook and Twitter. ) will do volumes for you aswell. Just imagine you sharing news about your stream everywhere. You will get a couple of viewers from Facebook, three from Twitter, maybe one from Instagram etc... And voila, you have steady 15-20 viewers. But beware, getting the people to visit your stream is very important, but keeping them to stay is key to growing.