A Beginner's Guide to Twitch Streaming

Jonah Cohen posted April 7th, 2021

So, you want to stream on Twitch. Why? This is the first step to starting any channel. Thinking about why you want to stream will allow you to think about what you want to do and accomplish by streaming. For instance, I stream for getting viewer interaction through chat and playing games together. Knowing this information is important so people will come to your stream and you can be successful.

The first step is making an account. If you intend on streaming, make sure you make your username one that people can remember. That way, new followers will be more likely come back to another stream. So a name like “noobgamer1369” wouldn’t be good because it is generic and it’s hard to remember numbers.

Once you make an account, you have made a channel. Every account has the ability to stream. From here, just add a logo to your channel that you would be happy with using for a while, because you will develop your look of the stream based on your logo. For the logo, I would suggest either using your face for your logo or I would design a clean and simple logo that matches your stream design.

Now that your channel has been created, you need to know how to actually broadcast to Twitch. To do this, you need a software to broadcast. My favorite software is an open source software called OBS studio. Since OBS Studio is open source, you can customize your experience to your needs. OBS Studio also is capable of a lot which can be difficult to understand at first, but once you learn the basics, it allows you to improve more than other software. After OBS is open, add a display capture source, audio input source, and audio output source to the scene. Then sign in to your Twitch account. If you just want this, go live and you will have an acceptable first stream.