Optus Mobile Review ALDI Mobile Review Amaysim Mobile Review Belong Mobile Review Circles.Life Review Vodafone Mobile Review Woolworths Mobile Review Felix Mobile Review Best iPhone Plans Best Family Mobile Plans Best Budget Smartphones Best Prepaid Plans Best SIM-Only Plans Best Plans For Kids And Teens Best Cheap Mobile Plans Telstra vs Optus Mobile Optus NBN Review Belong NBN Review Vodafone NBN Review Superloop NBN Review Aussie BB NBN Review iiNet NBN Review MyRepublic NBN Review TPG NBN Review Best NBN Satellite Plans Best NBN Alternatives Best NBN Providers Best Home Wireless Plans What is a Good NBN Speed? Test NBN Speed How to speed up your internet Optus vs Telstra Broadband ExpressVPN Review CyberGhost VPN Review NordVPN Review PureVPN Review Norton Secure VPN Review IPVanish VPN Review Windscribe VPN Review Hotspot Shield VPN Review Best cheap VPN services Best VPN for streaming Best VPNs for gaming What is a VPN? VPNs for ad-blocking All that being said, there’s a bunch of hardware you’re going to need to get started. A fancy gaming laptop is just the beginning. Depending on which platform (and gaming niche) you’re looking to cover on your stream, the costs of your equipment can balloon out considerably. You can go from an initial outlay of a few hundred dollars to thousands in no time at all. While using a laptop, singularly, to both game and stream is not usually recommended, it’s possible if you have decent specs or one of the best laptops on the market. Alternatively, you can absolutely buy a modest, secondary laptop to serve as a broadcasting workhorse to ensure your main gaming rig suffers no power drain whatsoever. Personally, we’d recommend the ASUS ROG STRIX GL502VM-DB71 as a middle of the road laptop with enough grunt to handle a balance of broadcasting and some of the more popular streaming games at a decent graphics setting. If you’re looking for something cheaper, we’ve also rounded up the best laptops under $1,000. On the lower end of things, you have the Elgato HD60, which is effectively a HDMI cable bridge that pipes out HD-grade footage (via a USB cable) to your broadcast PC. Alternatively, you can make a deep end purchase of the Elgato 4K60 Pro, a dedicated PCIe card that can handle UHD resolutions and HDR. In our experience, the best of the bunch is the Samson G-Track Pro (beloved for its extra mic supporting ¼ inch audio input that effectively makes it a 2-track audio mixer). We’re also partial to the HyperX’s Quadcast USB Microphone, which comes with a decent shock mount and a more aggressive, “hardcore gamer-cred” design. Those of you out to peacock a little might also want to invest in a gaming chair. Despite looking needlessly expensive and being garishly coloured to the point where they can’t coordinate with any other bit of furniture in your house, they are actually comfortable. Streaming will require long hours (or possibly days) of sitting on your butt. You may as well take care of said derrière. Lastly, interacting with your community can be a pain if you have to constantly shift your attention away from your keyboard or controller. You should therefore look into Elgato’s Stream Deck, which is essentially a highly configurable bank of LED buttons that you can assign to quickly handle…well, just about anything really. Chat responses. Quick banning of trolls. Camera switches. Ad breaks. You name it. Next up, you need to pick a gaming platform, game, streaming device and streaming platform of choice. Let’s look at it in terms of easiest to hardest setups. On the lower end you can easily stream gameplay natively on an Xbox One or PS4 using nothing but the freely available Mixer / Twitch / Ustream apps available in their respective stores. If you’re after better broadcast quality and greatly enhanced audience interactivity options, you need to look at adding a PC and capture device to that setup. Lastly, there’s the deeper end that is PC game streaming. If you’re not Moneybags McGee, playing a newly released AAA game will put your modest rig under considerable strain as it is. Adding video capture and transcoding to that workload will bog things down considerably as well. You should either bolster your specs up with a better CPU and GPU to compensate for this or acquire a secondary dedicated desktop or laptop to handle the stream and help take the load off. Once the hardware considerations are out of the way, all you need to do is sign up for your free account to Mixer, Twitch or YouTube Gaming. The goal now is to find your niche and build an audience. To do this you need to be one or all of the following: highly skilled, highly entertaining and a good host who interacts well with people who happen to drop by. Broadcasting consistently at certain times helps to build rapport and new eyeballs can be drawn in if you can manage to get your grubby mitts on a new game release earlier than anybody else.
HD quality: 0.9GB (720p), 1.5GB (1080p) and 3GB (2K) per hour. UHD quality: 7.2GB per hour.
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