I've been creating and hosting live streams of Street Fighter gatherings for a little over a year now and not only have I learned a lot since I first began, but I'm actually still learning little tricks here and there that keeps this hobby of mine as fresh as ever. With more and more outlets jumping into the fray of streaming live events, I've become something of a go-to person when it comes to figuring all this stuff out, so I thought today I'd share some of the knowledge that comes from producing constant streams a year later.

For everything technical regarding what sort of equipment or software you should be using, my good friend Niedel over at iPlayWinner (of which I'm a media consultant) wrote up a fantastic guide that covers all of that. When it comes to hardware, really, just about setup you can come up with will probably net decent results and in software, nothing beats CamTwist, which is a Mac only live editing application. Without it, I have no idea how I'd be able to do a lot of the cooler aspects of my streams.

As for everything else, here's my all-purpose advice for running a live stream.

Perfect Your Workflow

A pet peeve of mine when it comes to watching an amateur stream online is when the director doesn't have their workflow down. This becomes obvious when player names remain unchanged during a fresh match or when a camera shot strays from the action for far too long. This is something that can be ironed out in practice (which is why you see me do the occasionally advertised test stream) but it's also about paying attention. Running live streams is a lot of fun, but you have to remember that you have an audience that, thanks to the nature of the internet, probably have short attention spans and you risk losing a good chunk of your viewers for lazy mistakes.

When broadcasting, nail down 2-3 different shots that you can cut to easily and stick with them. This way, you're not trying to create new shots on the fly and you can keep the stream dynamic without any significant problems.

Don't Just Practice, Experiment

Once you've become comfortable with both your broadcast and directing capabilities, that's when its time to start being creative and experiment with different approaches on your design. A lot of the elements that people enjoy most from my broadcasts from the silly advertisements, picture-in-picture shots and other visual aides are all the work of experimentation. I've spent plenty of nights just fooling around with my streaming setup with friends, getting their opinions on new and different elements I could implement. 

For inspiration I mostly look towards broadcast television -- primarily sports. Fighting games and competitive gaming in general isn't that much different than sporting events so what is it that makes them so exciting to watch? This pursuit is what led to a lot of my design choices and decisions when it comes to creating unique shots. Think about what you'd like to see in a live stream, make it happen and put your own unique spin on it. Anyone can stream a Street Fighter tournament, that's easy. It's up to the individual to make it memorable for the audience.

Understand How the Internet Works

This sounds obvious, but there are a lot of people out there who don't understand how elements like bandwith and video codecs work together to either help or hinder stream performance. You don't need to be an internet wizard in order to understand how much bandwith you need or how keyframes work, but you do need to know which path to take depending on your circumstances. Again, this comes back to practicing and seeing what works best for you, 

There's also, of course, the human element of the internet. You need to develop a nice, thick skin and realize that stream monsters (people you've never heard of and who have never played in a tournament in their life who sit in the chat, talk about how horrible everything is, talk trash about the players and generally annoy everyone) are going to show up, some will hate your commentators and no matter how perfect everything is, there will always be a vocal minority that claims your stream is garbage despite it performing great for the majority of viewers. 

Telling the trolls apart from those who offer criticism is absolutely a skill and if you can't seem to tolerate it, get someone who can. Monitoring the chat and ensuring that people are enjoying themselves (despite the trash talk which again, is simply part of the experience it seems) is vital to the experience and it helps if you have someone on a separate machine to handle the social elements of your stream, including the all-important Twitter.

Clean Up Your Act

I'm by no means a saint but I do know that when someone sticks a microphone in front of you its time to watch your mouth. Not only does keeping the f-bombs away from the broadcast keep things more professional, but it also gives the stream monsters less to feed upon. The more you let the potty mouth out to play, the more aggressive your audience is going to be, guaranteed. 

My biggest pet peeve, and I can not stress this enough, is when I go to watch a tournament and it sounds like a bunch of wannabe thugs dropping curse words and homophobic slurs left and right. It makes me never want to have anything to do with these people, which is sad, because I love the fighting game community so much. For every viewer you thrill with lazy gags, you lose one. What would you rather have? A largely respectful crowd that you can be proud to call your audience? Or a mob of trolls that's just as ugly as the words coming out of your mouth? 

And that's the advice I share most commonly share amongst those looking to host their own stream. I'm definitely open to fielding questions here in the comments or on Twitter as I'm always happy to help out on this subject. I hope this gave you all something to think about!