Being a content creator can be pretty challenging, especially when you stack it on top of a "regular" job. And to turn streaming into a career, you have to be in as many places as possible to grow your audience, which can be difficult if you're not willing to pay up or do tons of research.

Multi-streaming to different platforms is a common approach these days, but at first glance, it might seem out of reach for most people. There are platforms like Restream that make this easier, but if you're not willing to pay for it, you'll be stuck with some unsightly watermarks that make the stream less appealing to potential viewers.

I spent a week looking for a solution to this and, after some headaches, I've finally landed on a solution that's completely free and works on most computers. Here's how I did it.

It all starts with OBS

The king of streaming software

Anyone getting into streaming will probably know about OBS, and that in itself is already interesting. OBS Studio is one of those rare pieces of software that proves that free, open-source solutions can set the standard and be the de facto solution for everyone in their respective field.

OBS is extremely powerful, with support for all kinds of inputs — including cameras, capture cards, video files, and more — to set up your stream layout, an easy way to create multiple scenes and switch between them, manage audio levels, resize elements. One big feature is the ability to add browser sources as content, which is important for a reason I'll get into in a bit.

But there's even more to it. OBS offers a ton of encoding options and built-in streaming to various platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, Restream, and others. And finally, the last big piece of the puzzle is extensibility. OBS supports a wide range of plugins that can expand its capabilities so you can make your streams even better. This is also extremely important for multi-streaming.

Streaming to multiple platforms

Plug-ins to the rescue

As capable as OBS is out of the box, that support for plug-ins is extremely important because multi-streaming is one thing this software can't do on its own. With a clean OBS setup, you choose one platform to stream to, and you have to commit to it. This does enable deeper integration so you don't have to leave OBS nearly as much, but it also limits your reach significantly.

This is where a plugin called SE.live comes into the picture. This plug-in is developed by StreamElements, a prominent player in the live streaming industry that provides a wide range of tools to help streamers monetize their content and grow their audience. Most of these tools are beyond my current understanding, but SE.live is quite easy to use.

You can simply download SE.live and install it, and the next time you start up OBS, things will look noticeably different with a few new docks. To enable multi-streaming, you'll need to create a StreamElements account and link it to the platforms you want to stream on, but once you do that, everything else is fairly easy.

For my relatively basic needs, I only kept two of the docks provided by SE.live: one for seeing the multi-chat, and one for managing the platforms I'm streaming to at any given time. SE.live enables you to stop streaming on one platform while continuing on another (as long as your primary stream remains active), so you can use that to help you fix issues, too. When I first tested the tool, my Twitch stream wasn't loading for any viewers, so I turned it off and back on while my YouTube stream kept running, and I was able to fix it that way.

I only used it for YouTube and Twitch, but SE.live also supports Kick, TikTok, Instagram, and others, so you can reach as far as you'd like.

While OBS runs on all major desktop platforms, SE.live is unfortunately only available for Windows and macOS, with the Mac version currently labeled as a beta. macOS is where I stream from, and while I've noticed a couple of crashes in OBS when I was setting things up, it held up totally fine through my nearly four-hour stream, so it seems fine. Other than that, the only weird thing I've noticed is my YouTube channel appears twice as an option for streaming, but otherwise, things are fine.

You can even embed a multi-chat session

Yes, even on macOS

This part is what really pushed me to write this article. While SE.live will allow you to multi-stream and you can embed the multi-chat window into the stream itself (in theory), this window is really meant for you to see and not viewers. Plus, it's fully opaque, so it covers up most of your stream. I wanted a solution that was more configurable and that could live on top of my main video feed without obscuring it completely.

If you're a Windows 11 user, there are actually a few solutions out there for this, but for Mac, it took me a while to find one. I was this close to accepting I needed a Windows computer again when I discovered SleepyChat. This is a very recent project — I asked the creator and they started working on it about six months ago — but it's entirely web-based and works perfectly.

You simply sign into the Sleepychat website, link your streaming accounts, and you can fully customize the chat widget. You can change how much space each message takes, text size, window transparency, text shadows, animations, and set up all kinds of viewer events for all your streaming platforms, so you can make things as engaging and visually appealing as you want. It even has some text-to-speech features that integrate nicely with each platform, too.

Again, my use case is very basic here. I just linked YouTube and Twitch, made the widget as transparent as possible, and added a text shadow to ensure it's still readable over the game screen I'm usually streaming. Once I had set things up, I just clicked the button to copy the link, and added a browser source in OBS pointing to that link. That added the widget with all my settings to the video feed, and it all worked perfectly.

Sleepychat is completely free to use for now with basically no limits, though a paid version is in the works so users can financially support development. The creator tells me the free version will remain very generous, which is certainly great to hear. If you're curious about the backstory, Sleepychat was actually developed just for the creator themselves initially, but once it was made, it was relatively easy to make a user account system, which is how it became a tool anyone can use.

Expanding your reach is easy

And you can level up your stream, too

Whether you use Windows or macOS, the combination of SE.live and Sleepychat makes multi-streaming very easy for anyone wanting to increase their audience. Prior to this I only streamed on YouTube, but I had been thinking about expanding to Twitch as well, and these two solutions enabled that.

And for me, it was also about improving the stream itself. The official YouTube chat widget I was using is fully opaque, which forced me to make the game window a lot smaller so as not to cover important game content. With Sleepychat's fully customizable widget, I was able to make the stream much more engaging by increasing the size of the game itself and having the translucent chat window over it. It looks and feels much better.

If you're a streamer, or thinking of getting into streaming, I highly recommend checking out these two tools, especially Sleepychat. Even if you don't multi-stream, this is a very useful chat widget that looks great and works on any platform, so it gets a recommendation form me either way.