A complete restream tutorial for beginners. I walk through all of the handy features of Restream to get you up and streaming quickly and easily.
How to use restream.io – Video Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the live stream, whether you are joining me live now, thanks for being here tonight, or if you’re catching us on the replay. So today I will be doing a tutorial to walk you through how to use Restream.
And I’ve been using Restream for almost a year now, and I kind of figured, Hey, I haven’t covered them in a tutorial before, and they definitely are a great option to consider. So I’m going to walk you through how I use Restream and all the features so that you too can either consider using them or if you’ve just got Restream and you’re kind of confused with how it all works.
I’m going to walk you through all of the features of Restream. So for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help coaches, consultants and creative pros build their business using video with ease. And I live stream a lot about live streaming to help you get the best live stream possible.
Now make sure that you check out the links in the description, because I’m going to timestamp this entire tutorials so you can go back and check out a section if you missed it or just, you know, use it to refer to other sections as well.
And they’ll also will be linked to all of the resources that I cover in this video. So let’s talk about Restream and how you can actually use it. So Restream is a live streaming software option and it works in a couple of ways.
So you can use it and using two, I’m going to call it methodologies, right? So the first method that you can use with Restream is you can use it, and this is how I personally use it, so I have Restream connected to my live streaming software.
So I use Ecamm Live, which is live streaming software that’s on my Mac, and that pushes out to Restream, and then Restream pushes that out to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, all of the different live streaming platforms. So I live stream once via my computer using Ecamm live and via Restream who then pushes that out.
So that’s one way that you can use it. And the second way that you can use Restream is you can use, Oh, that’s not the screen that I wanted to show, you use them via the web browser. So if you don’t have software such as OBS or Ecamm Live, you can live stream using Restream using their web browser option.
So kind of similar to their competitors, like StremYard or Be.live. They have a web browser version, which will allow you to multi-stream directly through them.
So you don’t need additional software, you can just do it using your web browser. So those are the two ways that you can use Restream. And I admittedly have been using it for the most part using the first method, where I have Ecamm live, which allows me to run the live stream and produce the live stream.
And then Restream pushes it out to all of the other software options. But I’ve noticed that over the last year they’ve significantly increased all of the functionality. They added the ability for you to use their web-based browser, a web-based solution to live stream.
So today I’m going to walk you through how to use Restream. Now let’s go over to, hope all things go well, my computer and I’m going to walk you through how to use Restream.
Okay. So, so far we are looking, okay. So this is Restream and with the Restream, you will be able to see that you can add destinations. I’m going to add myself to this.
Now with destinations, what that means is you have the ability to add all of the social media platforms that you want to live stream to. So here I’ve currently got connected my Facebook page and Periscope, and to add a destination, it’s the second option on the left-hand side here, you select add channel, and this brings up all of the platforms that you can connect and live stream to.
In addition to that, they have custom RTMP which allows you to be a bit fancy and have more complicated connections if you want, but I’m not going to go through that because I find RTMP really confusing.
But you can connect, you know, whichever account you want that you can see here, whether it’s your Facebook page, your YouTube account, your LinkedIn account, if you really wanted to live stream by LinkedIn and Periscope, all you have to do is select the actual profile and then follow the prompts to connect it.
I’m not going to personally do it now, but that’s how you would do it. And that’s where you would add the channels from. So after you’ve added the destinations that you want to live stream to, you’ll see this destinations page, right?
And in this destination section, you have the ability– so let’s just say, you’ve got multiple accounts here like I do here, and you only want, and you don’t want to live stream on that particular day to all of them. You can toggle them on and off, which is cool, which means that, you know, you can add it once and just choose the ones that you want to live stream to for that day.
Or you can add them back on. The other thing that you can do is in this update title section, this also allows you to, I’m going to let you take a guess what you can do.
You can update the title and the description in one place, and it will push it out to the other platforms as well. So that’s pretty handy. So it saves you a little bit of admin. So for example, you know, I’m going to put a very fancy title and then the description that will appear in either the Facebook description or the YouTube description section text here, and then you update that and then it pushes it out to the other one.
So that saves you a little bit of admin, in terms of having to not do things in multiple places. So that’s what you can do from the dashboard. Okay. The other thing that you can do with Restream is you can add events.
So the second tab on the left-hand side here, which is the, looks like a, it has a star in the middle of it. I’m not sure what it is. It might be a calendar. But if you click on that, what that allows you to do is you can set up your live streams as an event.
And what you’ll get is on Facebook, you’ll get the event set up as well as the YouTube page as well. So for example, see here this here, this Sara Nguyen plans to go live. This is the event that Restream set up for me and then people on my page can click get reminder so they’re notified when I go live, and it sits on my page until I go live.
When I do go live it will actually be the broadcast. So that’s pretty handy because it just gives you that ability to give people a little bit of warning. They can, you know, click on get reminders so that they get additional notifications when you go live.
And it’s really, really handy. So that’s what you can also do from the event section. So all you would do is go to the events section, select create event, and then put a title. So this is my fancy title, a description, you choose the date of when you’re going to go live.
So I’m going to choose the 10th of September at 9 o’clock. Oh, 9 o’clock. And then you can upload a cover image as well. So this will be the thumbnail image that appears on all of the accounts.
So I’m going to go to upload image. I’m going to choose an image. Let’s use that one and then click next. Once again, you can choose which platforms that you push out to, and you can just confirm the date and time.
And after you clicked save Restream will then, if it works, create the event, push it out as an event to your Facebook page or YouTube account, or whichever account you have set it up to be. So that’s how it will appear.
And then you will see them all when you log in to this event section here, right? Yeah. So that’s how you set up events. And then you can also, if you are live streaming and you have a guest, if you select the three dots here, you can copy the link and send that to your guest if you have, you know, a collaboration or you have people attending the live stream.
So you can do all of the setup from the events section. So that’s how you would utilise the events. And yeah, so that’s how you’ll do the events. Now, there’s also this other functionality on the left-hand side called scheduler, right?
So the whole concept of scheduler is that you can upload pre-recorded videos, so videos that you’ve already recorded and edited, upload them to Restream and then schedule them to push live to stream live.
So you may be thinking, why would I do that? Why wouldn’t I just upload it? Well, the theory is that because Facebook and YouTube and the other social media platforms favour live streaming.
And because they give you that notification of when the video is live, you can kind of use this as a way of going live without going live. So you can broadcast your video live, but not actually be live streaming.
So in order to do that, and my little mouse is not following me, you would upload a video. So you would go to the video section up here and select upload video, and that will upload the actual video that you want to stream after you’ve done that you go back to queue and then you schedule the video for when you want it to actually start broadcasting.
So that’s it. So I get a lot of questions from people who say, I really want to go live, but next week, all this stuff is happening or over the next few weeks, there’s a lot happening and I don’t physically have the time to go live, but I can record a video and push it out later.
So this is an option for you. And once you click schedule recorded video, the video that you ha– you can select the video that you’ve uploaded. And then you literally put the time and date that you wanted to go alive.
So I’m going to schedule this to go live on the 22nd of September at 8:30 PM. I’m going to select the advanced options. And that just lets me choose the accounts once again that I want it to broadcast to, and then I select schedule recorded video.
So I’m scheduling a video that I’ve already recorded to stream live at a certain time. So then I’m going to go schedule, record a video, and then you’ll see here, it’s got in my queue, this video will broadcast at the time that I set it for, and you can kind of stack them all up and use that functionality.
So that’s pretty cool, you know, I think that with live streaming, we need to be versatile and we can use this as an option to get our videos out there when we’re in a, when we need to release a video, but we can’t necessarily live stream.
So I think this is a really, really good option. You’ll also notice with your live streams in Restream, in the recording section here, this will be where your live streams will be stored. And they store it for 15 or 30 days, depending on which plan you’re actually on.
So once you go into the recording section, you’ll be able to download copies of your actual past live streams. So I’m going to show you on another account that this, so this is live streams that I’ve done over the last month and they’re all here.
And I can either download them as audio only, I can download the whole actual recording, or I can play it from here if I wanted to have a look at them. So it just stores it in the cloud as a backup for you in its little feature there.
So that’s what you can access from the actual, yeah, cloud section here. But let’s go into probably what the most sought out feature is. So that I think like the ability for you to live stream from your browser and not using third party software is a really attractive feature these days. So before I go into that, I did have a plan to show you something.
We are having all sorts of conundrums today, but this is the life you live when you decide to live stream. So let me show you, so let me put this on the screen. So can you see that? I don’t know if you can see that. That doesn’t matter.
Okay. I’ll show you later. So basically we’re going to go back to this. Oh, you could see it. Okay. Let me show you this because I’m telling you, I’m having a night tonight. What you see on the screen now is what it would look like using Ecamm live.
And with Ecamm live, what I would do is I would set the destination to be restream and then I would go live. So as opposed to if I was using Ecamm live just to go live to Facebook or just to go live to YouTube.
When I use my setup, I have Ecamm Live going to Restream as the destination. And then in Restream I’ve got everything set up, I’ve got my destination set up, and then it pushes it out from there.
The alternative option is to go using their web browser, right? Web browser option to live stream with. So let’s have a look at what that actually looks like. You can access that from this enter live studio option here.
And this is what it looks like on the inside of Restream. We’re going to do a couple of things to show you all of the features of Restream. So at the bottom here, you can see that there’s the microphone, so you can meet yourself.
You’ve also got the ability to disable your camera in case, you know, you need to be off screen for whatever reason, over the very right-hand side here, there’s this little cog setting thing. And if you click on that, that’s where you can choose the video option or the video input if you have multiple cameras, whether you want to use your webcam or your computer webcam, and then you’ve also got the option to choose your audio input as well.
And you can see that they’ve got this handy little soundbar thing, which lets you monitor the actual sound as well. So that’s pretty handy. If you click on advanced settings, you’ll see that they have the ability for you to choose between full HD so 1920 x 1080 at 30 frames a second, HD at 30 frames a second or HD at 60 frames a second.
So there’s just a couple of the options that you can play around within the settings there. You’ve also got the ability to share your screen. So before I do that, I’m going to put something on my screen to actually be able to share.
Here we go. I did this last time. I really did not think this one through. All right. So if you click on share screen, it allows you to either share a particular monitor that you have or an actual application window.
So I’m going to see if I can share an application window. Oh, and it did work. Okay. So I’ve added that and I’ve shared that once I’ve got that screen that I want to share, I can toggle it to be on this screen by clicking on the little toggle, right?
And then I’ve got a couple of layout options. So I’ve got like on the top right here. It’s got me and my little screen side by side. Otherwise, the other option is this zoomed in option. If I wanted to have it zoomed in more, but it does cut it out.
So that’s how you would kind of play with those settings. You can also play with like little spotlight options so you can see if I go like that, so just next to the toggle on the screen that I shared, I can make myself small and then the screen actually bigger.
Alternatively, I can switch that around. I can make myself bigger and then the second screen smaller. So those are, those are a couple of options. Otherwise, I can just have myself on the screen.
Alternatively, I can just have the entire screen share and not have myself on the screen. So these are the little toggles that you can play with that allow you to do that. And you can always toggle them on and off.
So that’s what you can do from the screen sharing option here. I’m going to stop screen sharing so that goes away. Now, one of the things with Restream is the ability for you to add guests. So I’m just going to warn my guests that I need him to come on now. Okay. Please come on.
And what you do to enable your guests to come on is you click on this button here, just underneath the actual video and you click invite guests and this gives them an actual link. So once they click on that link, they’ll be taken into their browser, which will allow them to come into your live stream.
So I’m just waiting for my guest. He’s appeared on this stream now, and you can see that they’re kind of like in the green room, just waiting until you select the toggle button, which allows them to actually be on the actual feed.
So I’m going to do that there. And my guest is now live on the feed. Everyone say hello to David, it’s actually David’s birthday today. So everyone say happy birthday to David. Thank you! So David’s on the feed there. And then I can play around once again with the layout.
So at the top, we have this option to either toggle between being like super zoomed-in side by side, two talking heads, or we can zoom it out a little bit and then it shows a bit more of the background. And like the ability that we had with the screen share option, I can toggle between having myself big on the screen or I can toggle between David being big on the screen or just myself on the screen or just David on the screen.
So those are a couple of things that you can play with, have a play with adding guests on the actual live stream. So that’s how you would add a guest. And once you’re done with them there, once you’ve finished with the guests, you can toggle them off-screen and then you can also click on the X there and that will kick them off the live stream altogether.
So that’s how you would actually play around with the guest function. All right. So now that we have that underway, what is going on? My technology has been playing up on all aspects tonight.
So I was like, should I do this? Should I do this? I was like, yeah, it will be fine. And then things are just popping up and being very strange night. So those are the settings that you have in terms of your camera and adding a guest and playing with the settings, and sharing a screen.
On the right-hand side here, this is where you have some more features, so let’s go through them. So first of all, we have chat, right? And chat is where you’ll see all of the comments that come through from all of your feeds.
I’m going to click on that here. So you’ll see little icons, whether it’s a Facebook icon or a Periscope icon or a YouTube icon or a LinkedIn icon, and in theory, all of your chat comments will be in this one section here, right?
So I’ve had a lot of comments from people who’ve said that when it comes to Restream, there’s a delay between the comments from Facebook coming into the feed. Upon research and upon talking to Restream, they said that’s Facebook’s fault.
And that means that there’s been a change to the API. But that essentially that you either need to refresh, or you need to disconnect your accounts and reconnect your accounts. So it’s just one of those things, technology, APIs.
Yeah. But chat is in the section here. Next to it, if you select captions, similar to what you get with StreamYard as your banners, this allows you to add text to your actual screen. So you can add two lines of text.
This section here, which says primary text is this white text here, and then in secondary text, that is a coloured text that appears in on the second line, hence secondary text. Now you can change the colour of it. So mine is set pink, but if you go to graphics on the top here and you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see primary colour.
And if you click on that, then you get to choose whichever colour of the spectrum that you want. So you can go crazy, whatever colour that you like. So that’s in graphics. So that’s how you play with captions.
And once you’ve finished with the caption, you can click on it and it will go off the screen. So you can set up all of your captions really easily, and then just toggle between them kind of like overlays on your actual, during the actual live stream.
Now let’s talk about the graphic section. So in the graphic section, there’s a little bit going on here. So this is where you can add your logo so you can upload your logo once you’ve uploaded it, it will appear on the top right-hand side, click off it and it will disappear.
In terms of overlays, once again, you can upload your overlays in this section as well. So this is an example of their overlays. You can use overlays to kind of, you know, be a little bit fancy and add some colour and visuals to your screen.
Whether that is just, you know, your lower third, or you can use it how I use it to like communicate messages and have some of your, you know, bullet points and keynotes on the actual screen. But the ability to add overlays is here.
And all you would do is you would select upload, and then you would upload the actual file that you want to appear as an overlay. And then you can just click on it when you want it to actually appear.
Same deal goes with videos, right? So you can add videos, whether you want them as the countdown timeout or the outro, or if you want to actually play videos during your live stream, you simply upload them, click upload, and then you can upload it from your desktop and then choose the file.
And then once you’re ready to play it, you can simply click on it and then it will play when you, play until it’s finished and then disappear off-screen. They’ve got this ability here where it says play a local video. So in this section here, what it does is that it actually uploads your video to Restream and hoses it there.
Alternatively, you can play a video from your computer if you want to live life on the wild side a little bit. So all you would do is click on that little section that looks like a clapper, and then you would load your video from your computer.
Uh let’s play this one, and then it would play immediately like this. Well, I lied. It will appear like this. And then you can, once you click on it, it will play like that. So that’s how you would play a video directly from your computer.
Now, let’s get going. So you can also add backgrounds, right? So, backgrounds are handy like when I was screen sharing, let’s screen share again so you can see what I’m talking about.
Let’s screen share. I really have lost my tab. Where’s my tab? That’s okay. Let’s screen share, my little audio thing. So let’s say you’ve got two things on screen that you want to show.
You can have background colours to kind of switch things around a little bit, right? So add some colour, have two things on screen, and you can also have background colours for when you have a guest on your actual live stream as well.
So that’s where you would do it. And you can upload it simply by, guess what you do, click on the upload button and then you would upload the image that you want to actually– yes.
So that is basically, let’s get rid of you, how you would use all of the features on the right-hand side here. Let’s go into set up. I can’t remember what was there. Oh, yes. In setup, remember when we were actually setting the destination?
So this is where you can also update the title and the description of the live streams as well. So you can do it there. But I don’t know why they put it there, ’cause you’re already in the live stream.
Why would you do it there when you’ve already done it before? Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. So that essentially is a walkthrough of how to use the Restream settings. So this has been an interesting night.
Pete Johns says, “Hey, Sarah, this is perfect timing for me”. So I saw Pete actually earlier in the night, in the afternoon. And he was testing out Restream as well. So, you know, coincidental, Pete, coincidental.
Really exciting. And Pete says, “Darn those APIs”, you know, I’ve seen lots of comments about people saying I connect it to Restream and I can’t see the comments, and it just happens to be one of those things.
And Pete says, “Live demos are a minefield, respect your bravery, Sara”. So I have to say that, I was preparing for the live stream, everything was all set up and ready to go, had dinner.
Did my, you know, put on my war dress ready to live stream and then went to log to Restream and it was down. And I checked Twitter and they’re like, “Oh yeah, we’re aware that it’s down for some users”.
And I was literally contemplating whether I reschedule or not, but we gave it a couple of minutes, it came back up and I said, let’s just do it. And it’s just been one of those nights where it’s like, “Hmm, Hmm. Should I have rescheduled this?” I don’t know. I thought I got through it. And I think that you know, I gave a good walkthrough of Restream.
So hopefully that shows you how to actually use the platform. Now, that essentially wraps us up. And if you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already, where I do a lot of social media and live streaming tutorials to help you live stream better and get your message and video out there.
Now if you really want to level up your live streams, make sure that you grab a copy of my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets if you haven’t got them already. It’s a super simple guide to get up and streaming on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before.
So I’ll put it on the screen as well as in the description for you to grab. Thank you so much, everyone for joining me tonight and putting up with me on this strange tech night.
It’s normally not like this, I promise. If this is your first time here, normally a bit smoother than that, but we got through it. We got through it. So thanks everyone for joining me. I will see you on the next live stream.
We’ll be doing a live stream on StreamYard versus Restream, which stream reigns supreme? So I’m going to be comparing the features of both platforms so you can decide for yourself which one is better if you’re kind of tossing up between them. We’re going to talk about the features and have a look at them side by side.
So that should be really fun. Thanks for joining me tonight or on the replay and I’ll see you on the next live stream. Bye for now.
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