What’s it like to use StreamYard as a tool for livestreaming? I review and do a tutorial demo of StreamYard to see if it’s one of the best live streaming software alternatives out there for 2020.
馃晵Timestamps馃晵
Streamyard pricing: 1:38
Behind the scenes in Streamyard: 2:44
Adding a guest to your livestream: 3:56
How to share your screen: 6:39
Adding text: 8:36
Customise your colours: 10:00
Adding overlays: 10:50
Adding backgrounds 11:39
Going live on Streamyard: 12:49
Viewing your comments: 13:08
Ending the livestream: 13:40
馃敶Get your free Facebook Live Cheat Sheets馃敶: https://saranguyenonline.com/special/facebook-live-cheat_sheets/
馃幀 Related videos 馃幀
ECamm Live Review: https://youtu.be/HygV4itzzzs
BeLive Review: https://youtu.be/vShfG3yIrjs
馃摀Resources mentioned馃摀
Be Live https://be.live/
Canva: https://saranguyenonline.com/canvaprofreetrial
StreamYard Review – Video Transcription
In this video, I’m looking at different live streaming software, the best live streaming software. I’ve been doing a couple of live streams today and I’ll do a couple of options so that, sorry, I’m getting distracted by all of the comments. I’m doing a couple of reviews of software options. I’m doing a review. This one will be on聽StreamYard. I did one on Be.Live and I have another one coming up on Ecamm Live so different live streaming options, and we’re reviewing them.
Not only are we reviewing them, but we’re also looking at what it looks like inside. You can see for yourself and then you can make a decision on which live stream software is right for you. Let’s get into this live stream without any further adieu.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help small business owners, coaches, and consultants build their business, grow their income and impact using video on social media. Big fan of live streaming. Make sure that you check out the links in the description because I’ll go back and I will also add all of the timestamps and I will add links to any resources that we mentioned in this聽video and all of the goodness happens in the description as you know.
Let’s go over and have a look at StreamYard. Let’s talk a bit about their pricing to start off with. Now, StreamYard has a free and paid plans. Obviously they are a company who provide a service. Paid plans are kind of important to generate income so they can provide us these services.
With the free version of StreamYard, you get the ability to run your live stream but you have their branding on it, and you have some limits. Whereas with the paid option, you get the ability to add your own logos. You get your ability to add your own images and overlays, and you also get the ability to multistream as well.
I really like StreamYard in the sense that allows you to multistream. I’m a big fan of doing something once and having many benefits. Multi streaming is one, which is definitely a time saver and that has made a big change to me in terms of creating content really efficiently. Big fan of it. Thumbs up to StreamYard for doing that.
Now, this is all nice and well,聽 but what does it actually look like? Let’s have a look at that now. We’re going to go into StreamYard. The interface is really clean and the interface is really, it’s not confusing. You go into StreamYard and you can set up the pages that you want to, all the accounts that you want to live stream to really easily. Then when you go to broadcast, you go to create a broadcast.
It’s, I find that nice that they’ve given you just what you need. There’s not all this chaos where you need to figure out where on earth do I need to be but more importantly, once you have logged into StreamYard and you want the action to start happening, this is what it looks like behind the scenes.
Now, I’ve got what you see here is the, I guess, the stream and then one of the things that you can do with Be.Live is you can add guest so if you wanted to do an interview, if you wanted to have someone present as well, all of the ability to do that is really easy, which is one of my favourite things about StreamYard.
Now I’m going to remove my face so that it’s not confusing for me and for you. This is StreamYard and in order to add people to your livestream, to have them as a guest, to have them present in the bottom option, in the bottom bar here, you’ll see there’s this invite option. Then when you click on that, it gives you the ability to generate a link.
Let’s go ahead and do that. This is the link, and once you’ve generated that link, you can send it to your guests and they will be able to then log into the live stream and be added. I’ve got David who is joining me as a guest so that I can demo this feature here. He’s gone ahead and clicked on the link and set it up. Once I’m ready to add them to the live stream, I just hover over it and select add to live stream.
Now David’s live on the live stream, and I have the option to display it as 50 50 on the screen or I can toggle between the other options. I can go a little bit back. I can go have him smaller or I can switch it around and have it display, you know, or have him take up the entire screen.
I like the ability that it’s really quick and easy to add a guest. You’re not fumbling around with a Skype link which you have to then connect, you give your guests one link and they click on it and they set themselves up like that. It’s really easy to add them to the live stream, and then you have the options to choose how you want them to display which is nice.
The thing that I find frustrating with live stream software is when they don’t give you the ability, like in this case to control the size of how your guest appears. You get to choose the sizes that they’ve got, but you can’t like drag their video size to be the width and height that you want it to be. It’s a limitation, but it’s not, I don’t think it’s a showstopper, but it’s really easy to add them and then, like, I also get the option to mute them if they’re being noisy or if they’re talking, I don’t want them to talk. I can mute them as the host and once I’m ready for them to leave the live stream, I can just remove them like that.
That’s a really easy way of, I guess, using the StreamYard and being able to add people to the live streams, and then I can like kick them from the studio as well. I’m gonna kick guest, and they’ll completely be out of the live stream. That’s really cool. I really liked that ability to add people to your live stream really easily, because there’s nothing worse than going live.
There’s already a lot going on. You have to keep an eye on the feed, you have to keep an eye on the sound and then you have a guest coming on and them struggling with it like that. It’s really stressful. This makes it really easy, which I really like the other feature that I like with StreamYard is that you can share your screen.
Common question I’m always asked is how do you share your screen? I’m going to go down to share screen. I’m going to click on that. Once I do that, there’s some advice here for me, but I get to choose whether I want to share which screen. If you have multiple monitors, you can choose one screen or the other, you can also choose a particular tab or an application.
I’m going to choose an application and now that I’m sharing this once again, like with how we had, when we were adding guests into the live stream, you can choose to have it as, you can choose to add them, add them to the stream. You can choose to have it full screen, or you can choose to have yourself in the picture as well.聽
You’ve got a couple options with sharing the screen. A few sizes there’s that size, there is that size or there’s full width. The other limiting thing that I don’t like, the limiting thing that I find with StreamYard is that once again, you can’t control the size of the screen to be what you want it to be.
You can choose between these three options, which is great because for the most part, this is probably what you really need either for your screen to be full screen or whether to have you on the site or not or there’s this alternative here, but you don’t get the option to choose. I can’t drag this screen anywhere like I can in some other software, but that’s not a showstopper. You can still share the screen really easily.
I definitely think this makes the software really powerful because it gives you another way of communicating, sharing and demonstrating your expertise also within StreamYard. What I like about stream yard is you can also play around with banners.
Adding text a big one that people always want to, people ask me about with live streams. How do you add text to the live stream? I’m just gonna make sure that I can still see this feed because it’s being blocked by another app on my screen. Okay, so to add text on the, everything happens in StreamYard on the right hand side.
If I click on banners, then I can add banners which run across the bottom of the screen and I can set up multiple banners so that these can be different talking points. When I’m ready for them to display, I just click on them when I’m ready for them to go away, I click on it again. Then if I want to add more, I just select create banner. And then I just type the text I want and then it appears.
There was another option there scrolling and click off you. If I wanted to add a scrolling option, like you see on those infomercials and I could do that as well. They call it a ticker. That’s, you know, all happens from the banner section where you can add multiple text elements and then just click on them when you’re ready to add them and click on them again, when you’re ready to make them disappear.
The other thing that you can do in StreamYard is optimise, optimise, you customise the colours. This is on the paid plan only. In terms of the brand colours, I have chosen this colour, but if I was to, I can choose any colour in the colour spectrum, really. If I want it to go pink, I could, if I want it to go blue, I could, and this would change the colour of the banners. Now that’s blue because I’ve switched it over.
You get the ability to customise the colours in that sense. You also get the ability to add your own logo. That’s an example of where it would display on the screen. You would have their logo, if you are on the free plan, if you are on the paid plan, then you can add your own and you would just literally be able to upload a logo file. That’s my one there as an example of how to do it.
Now, the other thing is overlay. I use overlays a lot in my live streams, as you may or may not realise, sample of an overlay, some texts, images, essentially an overlay is an image. Then it allows you to just add some more visuals to your live streams. You’ve got the ability to add your own and literally to add your own overlay. You go to brand under the overlay section, click on the plus section here.
Here’s an example of one of mine. I always have my cheat sheets as an overlay that I can add to my live stream, where it’s appropriate. This is another example of a overlay that I add. Another visual cue to break it up, so it’s not just my talking head the entire time.
You may have noticed as well that you can add a background. If you just have a black then what happens is when you’re toggling between your guests or having multiple, if you’re presenting, then the background will appear as black by default, otherwise you can add a coloured background. I’ll go and share that screen again. As you can see, the background is now black, but I could change it to be something else. When I do add, you know, my screen-share then it will be up in the background. I’m losing my words. I’m doing way too many live streams today.
The other thing is you can have your name display at the bottom, or you can hide it. I think in terms of being able to use it definitely very, very easy to use. You’ve got a lot of powerful features that allow you to add your own images, add your own text, and to kind of create your live stream show the way that you want it to appear.
Now, how easy is it to go live? As I said, everything happens on the right-hand side. To go live from StreamYard on the right-hand side, we click go live and then they don’t give you a countdown, so you need to be ready and then the button will go red and then you’re live.
It gives you a little bit of a sign here and then that’s it your live. You can see the comments in the chat on the right-hand side here. You can see comments that come through from any guests and you can add them to the live stream as well.
If someone’s saying something amazing, you can add it to live stream or hide it and just as usual with live streaming, you can see the, in the left-hand corner here, they’ve got a timer and you can see the count of people on that actual live stream.
That essentially wraps up, I guess, my crash course of an overview of StreamYard, and once you’re ready to end the live stream, all you do is select the end broadcast button, and then you can end the broadcast. They’ll ask you to write it and that’s it. And you’re no longer live. You can see that it’s ended here. Then that essentially wraps that up.
Let’s go back to here, back to me. In terms of StreamYard, being a option for live streaming to allow you to have the ability to customise your live stream. I think that these lives, all of these different live stream software options, what they really offer is a better user experience.
If you’ve used the Facebook, the native Facebook live streaming software, you’ll know that it’s, it’s clunky and it’s clumsy and it’s not nice to use, and it’s not easy to use. You have to figure so many, so much out, but when you have third party software like StreamYard, it makes it easier. Then you don’t have as much resistance to go live.
I definitely advocate using live stream software to make life easier for you to give you all the functionality that you get, that you wouldn’t normally get if you weren’t using a software, if that makes sense.
Do I recommend StreamYard as an option for live streaming? Yes, definitely. I didn’t demo every single feature of StreamYard. I just did an overview of the features that I know that I use, that I find useful and that people ask me, how do you add that to a live stream so that you could see for yourself how to do it in StreamYard? It’s really easy to use.
I think in terms of pricing, it’s fair for what you get. Like there’s a lot of technology that goes into it. I think the pricing is pretty fair and that’s pretty much it, hello, and thanks for everyone for joining. I see quite a few people here, so I hope that this was really useful. Hi, Cheryl, thanks for joining us. Hi, David.聽
I am doing, as I said, did I say it? I can’t remember now. All them live streams and days are merging into one. I’ve got another live stream coming where I’m talking about Ecamm Live. I’ve talked about Be.Live in a video. Check out the description, ’cause I review that and give you an overview.聽
We’ve done this one, which is StreamYard, and I’ve got another one coming for you, which is, Ecamm Live. Watch out for that and if you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel.
If you’re looking for more ways to grow your business, if you’re looking to get started with live streaming, make sure you grab my Facebook Live Cheat Sheet. It’s a super simple guide to help get you up and streaming on Facebook live, particularly if you’ve never hit record before. I also have a roadmap in there that shows you how to convert your viewers into buyers, so make sure that you get that. If you haven’t got it already, I’ll add the link on the screen and somewhere in description in the description, it should already be there. And I will see you on the next live stream. Thanks for joining me and I’ll see you.
