Social media live streaming software free download

Some more technical equipment you might need includes: — An external microphone. The length of your live stream will depend on the platform you choose for your broadcast. At Uscreen for example, you can live stream for more than 50 hours per month with our Enterprise plan. Amir is the Head of Search at Uscreen who's abnormally intrigued by all things marketing.

He's also a composer and pianist who's rarely loved by his neighbors because all he ever plays is atonal music. But cats love him so it's fine! Stay up to date with the latest video business news, strategies, and insights sent straight to your inbox!

The numbers are in: has been the year of live streaming boom. People are watching more live video than ever before, making it a monetization goldmine. Here are six smart ways to make money live streaming. Here's how you can create a live streaming website in Subscribe to the Uscreen newsletter to receive the latest video business insights, strategies and promotions straight to your inbox.

Content What is a Live Streaming Platform? Youtube Gaming FAQs Share this post. How some of the top social media platforms run their live-stream offerings. Other paid-for tools that you might be considering. All the major social media platforms offer live streaming — Facebook and YouTube even have gaming-specific sections on their sites — with huge reach and a large audience, although monetization options are limited and restricted.

Live streaming gaming is a massive industry and Twitch has a massive chunk of the market with a well-refined platform, although Facebook and YouTube are both going after the market. Always one to be different, Reddit offers a unique live streaming experience with limited broadcast times and wholesome, user content fully encouraged and no monetization options; while Amazon is the complete opposite and out to monetize their live streaming with their Amazon Influencers.

Even though the Mixcloud platform is specific to music and audio, they still see the benefits of live streaming, having added it to the platform relatively recently. The focus on video in general — and live streaming in particular — from some of the biggest tech companies in the world is a clear sign that this is a format you should be working on. What is a Live Streaming Platform? Which of these various platforms is going to work for you?

Book Now. Where can I live stream for free? What equipment do you need to live stream? How long can I live stream for? These reviews are based on streaming capabilities, video quality, integrations, video editing capabilities, pricing, support, and more.

Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links that I may receive a small commission for at no cost to you. However, these are the tools I fully recommend when it comes to live streaming. You can read my full affiliate disclosure in my privacy policy.

Restream is a cloud-based streaming service that lets you simultaneously stream videos to over 30 platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, etc.

On top of that, Restream also comes powered with plenty of additional tools to help you promote and analyze your live broadcasts. For instance, you can use the Restream Events feature to schedule and announce your upcoming stream in advance to build excitement. You can identify the most popular part of your stream, the peak time, the total number of viewers, watched minutes sorted by the platforms, and more.

In addition, they have a built-in chat feature that you can display as an overlay during your live stream. There are even options to customize the look-and-feel of your chat box using over 20 pre-designed templates. Try Restream risk free for 7 days. OneStream is the best overall streaming software, with the ability to stream and record live and pre-recorded videos, and publish them to over 40 social media platforms.

With pre-recorded streams, you can record and then schedule your broadcasts to social media platforms up to 60 days in advance. With live streaming, you can couple OneStream with other streaming tools configure this tool, and start multicasting:.

Scheduling pre-recorded videos is also super easy. You just upload your video file, pick a date and time, and select your streaming destinations like YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, Periscope, and more. OneStream provides four pricing options:. Wirecast is a live video streaming production platform developed by Telestream. It helps you create TV-like live stream production and on-demand broadcasts for the web. You can leverage its flexible and intuitive UI to customize your live feed easily.

All you have to do is just plug in your mic and camera. It automatically handles all the encoding to deliver your live stream to any geography at scale. To help you capture your video content on the go, Wirecast also offers a free iOS camera app.

It also lets you embed live captions to make your videos more accessible for differently-abled viewers. Other social media management tools will allow you to manage Facebook Live comments. You might want to add lower-third text to display your name, an overlay image to add some branding, and more.

Some tools make this really simple, but without the ability to customize the layers. However, some tools give you a few more options to customize without making it too difficult. Some tools allow you to have lots of layers and give you full control over the look and feel.

Most tools allow you to add different types of overlays. More advanced tools like OBS Studio, Wirecast and vMix allow you to customize the layouts of your sources and overlays completely. Some tools like StreamYard and BeLive only offer you simple pre-built templates, such as split screen and solo views. And some offer templates and full customization. In your show, you could just have one view or scene throughout.

It could be just your camera - or you and your guest. But that can be very boring for your viewers. You also may want to have a show intro video, and perhaps a video to end. They include a show intro video, a couple of different split shots showing me and my guest , solo shots of me and my guest on our own, pre-recorded videos of my sponsors with me as a picture in picture, and lots more.

Some tools have simple layouts that you can toggle between. For example BeLive and StreamYard have different types of split view layouts showing you and your guest s as well as solo shots and a screenshare.

Other tools allow you to create lots of scenes ahead of time which you can then select as you through your show. A few tools allow you to add audio files to your scenes - allowing you to add sound effects and music.

Some tools allow you to add pre-recorded video as a scene. This is useful if you have a show intro video, or you want to display a video to discuss on your show. There are lots of different types of text overlays. Some tools have limited types - usually a title which will appear on the screen when you want. Most tools will allow you to add other text on the screen for lower thirds and other things.

Some allow you to change the font type, size, color, background and effects such as scrolling. Ecamm Live allows you to add a PDF as an overlay. This is perfect if you want to give a presentation using your PDFs. You can resize the overlay and make it full screen, and you can move through each page of your PDF very easily.

Being able to assign keys for different actions in your live streaming tool can be really useful - particularly for switching scenes. Elgato Stream Decks are physical devices with fully customized full-color buttons.

You can program them to do different things in your live streams or anything on your computer. Some tools have developed Stream Deck plugins that allow you to switch scenes, display your live viewer count and lots more. In those situations, your producer can control the broadcast, switch scenes, and even moderate comments while you get on with hosting. Some tools allow a producer to produce the show by logging into a web interface. Where as some tools will require the producer to run the live video streaming tool on their computer and bring you onto your show as a remote guest.

It would also be possible to allow your producer to remotely control your computer and control the tool on your computer. When you switch between scenes, you might want to add some fancy transitions between them.

Some tools only offer a simple cut transition and a simple swipe transition. And some offer lots of fancy ones including cross dissolve, zoom, light rays, ripple, copy machine, and more. Ecamm Live offers this option. It can be really helpful to adjust the picture of your cameras within the live streaming tool. For example, brightness, white balance, saturation, gamma, manual focus, color grading LUT, mirror, and deinterlacing.

Being able to zoom and pan in your camera view is useful so that you can get the perfect composition. With some tools you have to crop and zoom, and it can be quite time consuming to sort this out. Some other tools such as Ecamm Live allow you to zoom and pan to get the composition you want. All live video tools allow you to select which camera you want to use for your live stream. However, some tools allow you to switch between multiple cameras - giving you different camera angles.

All tools will allow you to select which microphone you want to use for your audio. But some tools allow you to use more than one microphone - useful if you have guests in your studio. Some tools allow you to add a web widget either as an overlay or on a scene on its own.

Using a service like StreamLabs widgets you can add special effects, chat boxes, alerts donations and more. Some tools have an advanced feature which allows you to output your stream or bring in an external source via NDI.

This stands for Network Device Interface and is a royalty-free software standard developed by NewTek. It allows the broadcast of high-quality video over your network. If your tool has an NDI output, it will allow you to display your broadcast on a different device on your network, or use it in a different app.

If your tool allows NDI inputs, you can bring in high-quality video from other NDI devices on your networks such as cameras. Some tools allow you to output the video of your live show to a virtual webcam. This allows you to use your video in another live streaming or video conferencing tool. Some tools allow you to output the audio of your live show as a virtual audio device. This allows you to use your audio in a live streaming or video conferencing tool. Or you could output the audio to an audio tool like Adobe Audition or Audacity to record your podcast.

Webcams such as the Logitech C are great to start off with. The Logitech Brio is a great upgrade with 4K resolution. But if you really want to make your live video shows look more professional, upgrading to a digital mirrorless or dSLR camera is the best way. However, if you have a compatible Canon camera, you can plug it directly into your computer via USB.

Ecamm Live will show your Canon camera as a source without any extra software or hardware. Some tools will allow you to share the screen of your phone or tablet on your live video. Blackmagic make cameras, HDMI converters and more. Some live video streaming tools connect directly to the device so that they can use special features like deinterlacing.

Some tools allow you to monitor your video and audio sources in a mixer. This will let you adjust the volume of all your different sources. Although you might only want to interview one guest, it can be fun to have a group. Many tools allow you to have multiple guests on your show - varying from 2 to 50 or more. I mentioned how many tools allow you to add layers.

This can be the case when adding guests to your show. Some tools such as Ecamm Live, BeLive, and StreamYard make this really easy for you - giving you split screen and solo view views. Some tools allow you to fully customize the view - allowing you to crop, rotate and resize all your guest views.

When your guest is on, what do they see on the screen? Do they see what your live viewers will see? Or do they just see your camera? Do they see the comments?

But it also allows you to make sure everything is set up before and then you can bring them on at the appropriate time. Not all tools have a green room feature. Having a chat feature between you, your guests, and an optional producer is a useful feature. Platform: Dedicated app. Ecamm Live is a dedicated live streaming video app for Macs only. The Standard plan has everything you need to get started and will be fine for most people, but the Pro plan does give you some really cool features including 4K streaming, virtual webcam, widget overlays, live video monitoring to any display, audio monitor output, Facebook page crossposting, and more.

Ecamm Live has a free day trial that allows you to try all of the features including Pro-level features with very few limitations. There is an Ecamm Live watermark during the trial. It allows you to bring in guests via the web using Interview mode really easily.

And it even integrates with the Restream Chat API - meaning you can highlight comments from all the networks you are multicasting. You can record the video in a high-quality format, too - and the quality is top-notch. You can add countdown timers and have full control over the look and feel of the text.

You can bring in pre-recorded video and the scene and layer management are really powerful. The Stream Deck plugin is pretty awesome, too. Ecamm has some very advanced features.

It was built from the ground up and is of amazing quality. It also supports video backgrounds too. Ecamm Live has the ability to stream in different aspect ratios widescreen, super-widescreen, square, and portrait , Facebook crossposting, videos, continuous Facebook Live streams, virtual webcams, NDI, and more.

This is a massive feature! They also have a really helpful and active Facebook community that you can join for free. Standard plan users have to rely upon Skype to bring in guests, but pro users can use Interview mode.

You can't change the transparency or rotate any layers in Ecamm Live, but this is unlikely to be an issue unless you're a very advanced user. Without doubt, Ecamm Live is my favorite and top recommended live video streaming tool for Mac. It offers that sweet spot between power and ease of use. But I am nitpicking!

It was the only free tool at the time that offered streaming to Facebook Live and other platforms. OBS is how I started my live streaming journey. But once you get your head around that, OBS Studio is incredibly powerful.

You can create multiple scenes - each with as many layers as you like. You can add your camera and microphone sources, videos, images and lots more. And you can easily crop, resize, rotate and adjust each layer as you like. It integrates fully with the Elgato Stream Deck family. It also allows you to record as well as streaming.

You have full control over all the video encoding presets - which may or may not fill you with joy. It also has some very advanced features and a large user base. And there are loads of plugins that allow you to customize OBS Studio even further. A big missing feature is the inability to view or highlight comments. OBS Studio is very resource-intensive. But if you want a lot of flexibility and the ability to customize and want something free, OBS Studio is worth considering.

But the difficulty of bringing in guests and the inability of viewing and highlighting comments on your streams is a big disadvantage. Wirecast is a professional live video streaming and production tool from Telestream. It runs on Macs and Windows-based PCs. It focuses on producing professional live videos and has some advanced features - so it does have a bit of a learning curve.

But, unlike most other tools in this list - these are no subscriptions. Wirecast One is no more but was a very basic product. You could stream in 4K, but you were limited to one camera or source and you couldn't bring in any remote guests. Wirecast Studio has most of the main features of Wirecast including unlimited sources, bringing in guests up to 2 , remote desktop presenter, and more.

Wirecast Pro adds more advanced features including the ability to bring in more remote guests up to 7 , instant replay, NDI output, and being able to send multiple streams with different audio tracks or languages. Wirecast is incredibly powerful and pretty robust. It gives an almost overwhelming array of features. Like OBS Studio, all the layers are customizable, but Wirecast allows even more such as 3D rotation, animated text, 3D layouts, and virtual sets.

If your computer can handle it, Wirecast can multicast to lots of different platforms. And it can record your stream to your computer - even in multiple formats simultaneously. Wirecast Pro has an ISO feature that allows you to record each source separately - which is great for repurposing.

But this also allows you to replay a previous section of your live stream as an instant replay. I hope that Telestream gives Wirecast a radical overhaul of the user interface in the near future. One big gaping hole in its feature-set is its inability to view and highlight comments from Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and other platforms. It does integrate well with 3rd party software such as NewBlue Titler Live, but that software has a steep learning curve as well and is going to be very difficult to manage both apps at the same time if you are producing as well as hosting.

Not to mention expensive. Wirecast has a feature called Rendezvous for bringing in guests. Hopefully, their support will improve, and you can pay for priority support that may be better. I love some of the more advanced features - the level of customization on the layers, ISO recording, multicasting and more. For professional live streams from both Macs and PCs, Wirecast is the tool you should consider. But for a robust and professional live streaming tool for Macs and PCs, Wirecast is a great tool to check out.

It also gives you 4 overlays channels and a video list a playlist of videos. For high-level professional streaming, many people prefer to use PCs. So it allows you to do very powerful things like multicasting, recording and ISO recording effortlessly. It also allows you to customize just about everything. For comments, I love their vMix Social feature. It allows you to bring in comments from multiple platforms. You just tell vMix where the live streams are, and it will grab the comments.

You can even have a moderator log in to the web interface and control them from there. Because vMix is Windows only, Mac users will be disappointed. I was surprised that not all destinations have proper API connections. For example, although you can create a scheduled broadcast on Facebook Live on vMix, this is not the case for YouTube Live.

You need to create the broadcast on YouTube and enter the stream key into vMix. But for those people who want to create really professional live streams with lots of customization, multicast, highlight comments from all your platforms and ISO recording, vMix is a big contender.

Yes, there is a very steep learning curve and it can be clunky in places, but for professional live streamers who have a PC and want full control, vMix is a great solution.

Restream officially launched in as a multistreaming tool. Today it allows live broadcasts to multicast to 30 destinations and has an integrated chat tool for comments , scheduler and analytics tool. In , Restream launched a browser-based live streaming studio called Restream Studio. As well as allowing you to multicast to 30 destinations with integrated comments for many of those, you can have up to 10 people on screen, add overlays, graphics and more.

Please note, in this section, I am referring to Restream Studio, which is the browser live video tool part of Restream. Restream has 5 plans - Free, Standard and Professional for individuals and Premium and Business for companies. All plans give you the ability to stream to over 30 destinations, Restream Studio, comments, screen sharing, guests and analytics.

The free plan has a limit of 6 people on screen for Restream Studio. Also, note that Restream adds their own watermark to Studio, and appends "multistreaming with Restream. The professional plan and above, also give you full HD p in Studio, custom graphical overlays and more. Restream Studio is quite a new web-based streaming tool, but it's still feature-packed.

You can have up to 9 guests 10 including yourself on your show at one time. And the ability to multicast to up to 30 destinations is amazing. You can create scheduled live videos with its events feature. It's the only web-based live video tool that supports stereo sound and playing a local video as source. There are more and more features coming, and I've been impressed with how quickly new features are being rolled out.

Restream Studio is still new, so there are still a few things lacking. But they've added so many new features recently. At the moment the number of layouts is fairly limited and there's no option for green screens. Restream adds a watermark and branding to your broadcasts on the free and basic paid plans too. If you want to remove that, you'll need to upgrade to the Professional plan, which is more expensive. I really love what Restream are doing with Restream Studio and it's quickly becoming the most powerful browser-based live video tool.

And the way you can use other live video software with Restream is incredible. The multistreaming and chat features are invaluable, and the ability to bring in so many guests is powerful. If you want to remove the Restream branding, it's more expensive than other tools, but you get a lot for your money. Platform : Web app runs in the browser. Also iPhones, iPad, Android via web browsers. StreamYard was launched in and is a live streaming tool that works through the browser.

And it allows you to multicast - broadcast to more than one platform at the same time without requiring a supercomputer! It allows you to have up to 9 guests on your show and you can highlight comments on the screen.

The Free plan is very generous. You do have to put up with a StreamYard watermark on the top right of your live streams though and has a limit of 20 hours of streaming per month. But you do get up to 9 remote guests up to 10 people can be on-screen at one time , screen sharing, green screen functionality, video sharing, on-screen comments, and banners. The Basic plan removes the StreamYard watermark, gives you unlimited streaming, the ability to add your own branding, recording of up to 4 hours, and multicasting to up to 3 destinations.

The Professional plan gives you 8 hours of recording each month and multicasting to up to 8 destinations. It also adds full HD streaming p although the max resolution you'll get from your webcam is p. StreamYard is really easy to use and works through your web browser. Because of that, it works on both PCs and Macs. The paid versions have multicasting built-in, meaning you can broadcast to more than one live platform at the same time.

The most amazing feature is that it allows you to view and highlight comments from all the destinations it streams to except LinkedIn Live. And yes, it does integrate with LinkedIn Live. The free version has some powerful features like the ability to bring in up to 5 guests, screen sharing for hosts and guests and green screen. It also has some advantages like its ability to detect all videos of a webpage , downloading videos in their native formats.

This extension also shows video format and video size of each detected video to help you download the right video. All Video Downloader Professional is another completely free social media downloader extension for Chrome. Using this extension, you can download videos from various video hosting and social media websites. Plus, it also helps you download videos in your favorite resolution as it shows various versions of a video with different resolutions p, p, p, etc.

At a time, it only lets you download one video because it can only detect a video which is being played in the web browser. By clicking on the icon of this extension, you can view all versions of the detected video and download any version of the video that you want.

Apart from video downloading, you can also fetch video links by clicking on the copy to clipboard icon. In general, it is another really handy extension to download videos from various social media websites. Flash Video Downloader is another free Chrome extension that helps you download social media videos. You can also use this extension to download video from various video hosting websites Vimeo, Metacafe, etc. This extension detects all videos of a social media web page and displays them as a list.

From the list, you can select one of the videos and click on the associated Start button to download that video. Hence, it will not convert video in some other format before saving it to your system.

In it, you also get a trigger functionality that immediately informs you when a video with more size than the specified size limit gets detected. Users can stream directly to Periscope from a mobile device, or an encoder with Periscope Producer , a program designed for content creators and streamers. Periscope released Periscope Producer in , opening up their API to third-party streaming encoders.

This release created new avenues for brands to stream to Periscope and, by extension, Twitter. If you have access to Periscope Producer, you can effortlessly stream from Vimeo to Periscope or Twitter. This help center article has step-by-step instructions that will walk you through getting started.

Following on the heels of Facebook Live, Instagram rolled out its own live video function in the fourth quarter of Your story will also move to the first spot of the Stories queue at the top of your feed.

Over million people use Instagram daily, and more than million Instagrammers visit at least one business profile daily. With the right live video strategy, brands can use Instagram Live to help drive engagement with their target audience, and even boost the bottom line. There are a number of ways to access the live video feature in the Instagram app. To start a live video you can either tap on the camera icon in the top left corner, swipe right on your feed, or tap to add to your story.