Twitch is the reigning king of the streaming market, but plenty of services are looking to claim the throne for themselves. That list of wannabe rulers includes Facebook Gaming, the social network’s service-within-a-service, which is attempting to bolster its position today by announcing a partnership with the popular Streamlabs platform.
Streamlabs offers a variety of tools for streamers: alerts that enable audience interaction, the Streamlabs OBS broadcasting software and other services made specifically for livestreaming. It’s also expanded its platform in recent months by partnering with Intel and introducing an app store exclusively for streamers.
Now that Streamlabs has partnered with Facebook Gaming to enable the following features in the Streamlabs OBS app:
- Embedded Chat: This widget adds an overlay to streams to drive chat interaction visibility for everyone, no matter where or when past streams are being played.
- Auto-fill Stream Information: This feature pulls and pre-fills stream info (title, description, etc.) from either a scheduled stream or your last stream.
- Automated Notification: Because Facebook allows you to stream up to four hours per session, they’ve implemented a warning message when you are approaching the stream limit.
- Stream Schedule: When you schedule a live video, an announcement post will be published to your News Feed letting fans on Facebook know the broadcast is coming.
Streamlabs is also working on Facebook-specific features, like alerts for when someone “Likes,” follows or shares a stream. The company didn’t offer an estimated release date for these alerts; it only said they’re “coming soon.” That feels like a glaring omission at launch, but at least Facebook Gaming streamers have something to look forward to.
Now the bad news: streaming to Facebook Gaming requires a dedicated Page rather than just a normal Facebook account. It’s not hard to set one up, but compared to streaming on other platforms, it is an additional barrier between streamers and viewers. Streamlabs can’t really do anything about that, but it could still be mildly frustrating.
We aren’t exactly clear on why someone would choose to stream to Facebook Gaming instead of another platform. Twitch has the dedicated streaming audience, YouTube has more focus on videos and other streaming platforms have the benefit of not being on the same place where people share political memes and recipe GIFs.
But we aren’t ones to stop streamers from following their wishes. And thanks to this partnership between Facebook Gaming and Streamlabs, now they’ll have more tools available for their apparent platform of choice. The features are available now via Streamlabs OBS.