Now that I’m all settled into my weekly routine with college I feel like it’s time to get back to writing. To that end I’m planning on restarting my live writing sessions and doing them at least twice a week. The only problem is figuring out which streaming site to use. My basic requirements are thus:

– Must support at least 720p streaming. Anything less and you can’t read the text as I’m writing

– Must support live chat. There’s no point doing live writing if people can’t chat to you about it as you’re doing it. Also would prefer chat to be enabled whether or not a user has an account with the site.

– Prefer support for streaming my audio output along with my microphone. This enables people watching to listen to my writing playlist live and negates the need to add a soundtrack to the video later.

– Prefer free or inexpensive services. I’m a poor student now so I can’t really afford to pay for some fancy streaming service.

– Prefer the site to not be primarily a game streaming site.

 

That’s it really. So with those requirements I’ve been checking every streaming site I could get my hands on. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

 

Google+ Hangouts On Air:

Very easy to use and you can stream individual application windows rather than all or parts of your computer screen. You can schedule events and invite people from your circles to join. This would be my ideal streaming service/tool if it weren’t for two HUGE flaws. It doesn’t let you stream you audio output (i.e. the music you might be listening to) and it’s chat function doesn’t function. I’ve tested this numerous times and no matter what I do people who join the Hangout can’t see the chat window. Just the video. This pretty much defeats the purpose of doing a live writing stream in the first place.

 

YouTube Live:

I have the XSplit streaming software that I picked up some time ago to stream my World of Warcraft multiboxing sessions and these both work quite well together. The only problem is there’s no chat interface at all. None.

 

Twitch.tv:

This actually hits all of my requirements and is the service I used during the 2014 NaNoWriMo event to live stream my writing. My only concern here is that it’s nominally for live streaming gaming. This is definitely not gaming and thus wouldn’t be of interest to people browsing the site. Right now it’s my only real option though I’m hoping to find a better one. Twitch also lets people chat without an account, so bonus there.

 

Livestream:

I had quality issues with my stream coming from XSplit. They also want you to upgrade to a paid account if you want to use chat or any other basic feature beyond streaming.

 

FC2Live.us

Looks like it might work but appears to be used mostly by folks outside of the US. I definitely want a US-based site at this point.

 

UStream:

Another paid streaming site, this one geared towards enterprise or business users. Not for me.

 

hitbox:

Gaming site again. Le sigh.

 

UVlog.com:

This might be an alternative to using Twitch.tv but so far there isn’t much there. I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how the site evolves.

 

 

So there it is, the list so far. I’m going to keep searching for the best site for my purposes but for the moment it looks like I’m stuck with Twitch. I’ve had some thoughts for fixing at least one of the Google Hangouts issues but the chat one is a total deal-breaker. If they got that fixed I could find a work-around for the whole audio streaming issue. I might send a message or two out to some folks I follow who stream regularly. They might have some ideas. Either way my goal is to start live writing again this Thursday!