Making an Interactive 24/7 Live Stream with a Touch of Philly Sports
Improve Live Streams with Interactive Commands
We all know that live streaming is big nowadays; according to the Conviva State of Streaming, live content accounts for almost a quarter of global viewing time. As a content creator, you have to be on top of your competitors and differentiate yourself even more than just the niche you're activating in.
One thing you can do is use chatbots and commands in your live streams. This is especially useful when you're live streaming while doing another activity - driving, hiking, gaming, etc. - and cannot reply to your audience's questions. Or when you're not in the live stream at all times - like our 24/7 Starlink stream on Twitch. Bottom line - live stream chatbots and commands are tools to help increase the interaction with your viewers, hence, help grow your followers/subscribers.
Real World Example: How Viewers Interact with Speedify's Starlink Live Stream Commands
Here are the available commands for the viewers, currently only available on our Twitch live stream - feel free to try them out yourselves by typing them into the chat area with an exclamation point:
!gobirds - Go Eagles!!!!jalen - Jalen Hurts dances on the Starlink dish!fightsong - Philadelphia Eagles fight song lyrics!touchdown - hoping for as many as possible!eaglesstats - Live team and player stats for the Birds from sportradar.com!chiefsstats - Live team and player stats for the Chiefs from sportradar.com!eaglesodds - Live updating betting odds for the upcoming game from sportradar.com
UPDATE: As of March 8th, 2023, we removed the commands above related to the Eagles, as we noticed a high GPU load on our streaming computer which could have generated issues related to the live stream.
Plus we've also got:
- !speedify - chatbot displays what Speedify does
- !sale - the current available promo sale for Speedify
- !sup - what we're currently doing
- !starlink - what Starlink is
- !discord - link to our Discord channel
- !commands - list of commands from StreamElements
- !zoom - main camera zooms in
- !zoom2 - main camera zooms in more
- !expressway - main camera zooms in on the Vine Street Expressway to show traffic
- !cam2 - alternate camera view
- !bridge - zooms in to the Ben Franklin Bridge to New Jersey
- !cityhall - zooms in to the Philadelphia City Hall
- !enhance - zooms in to the William Penn statue on top of the City Hall
- !kingkong - dancing gorilla overlay
- !snow - snow fall overlay
- !birds - flock of birds overlay
- !astronaut - astronaut dancing on Starlink dish
- !ufo - you'll have to check this out yourself 😉
- !graph - zooms in on the Speedify bonding activity graph
- !map - switches to the live Starlink satellite map view
How We Set Up the Chatbot and Commands for Our Starlink Live Stream
For context: here is our Starlink stream setup. Now, going to the chatbot and commands setup.
Initially we were only using the StreamElements for animated overlays and chat commands, but we wanted to be able to control OBS scenes with chat as well. Here's how we did that:
- We’re using Advanced Scene Switcher to cycle through scenes
- We added StreamLabs Desktop Chatbot because it supports OBS websocket control.
- We’re using this OBS Remote Parameters script in the StreamLabs Chatbot, which allows us to set up custom commands that viewers can type in the Twitch chat to control OBS scenes via the OBS websocket.
- We also had to install this Websocket-4.9.1-compat version of OBS for compatibility with the StreamLabs chatbot because the Remote Parameter scene switching doesn’t work with the updated websocket included with OBS 28
How it works:
- Streamlabs Desktop Chatbot is connected to our Twitch chat.
- Streamlabs Desktop Chatbot reads chat commands in the Twitch chat and triggers OBS Remote Parameters over the OBS Websocket.
- OBS temporarily switches to the specified scene when it receives commands over the websocket.