Have you seen the live gameplay on Twitch or YouTube? Don’t you think that the gaming industry is huge enough to accommodate some more live streaming platforms like these?

Where YouTube is quite diverse, and only Twitch focuses on e-sports and gaming, there is still huge scope for focused live game streaming platforms.

A recent successful example is Nimo TV. It is a live game streaming platform focussed in south-east Asia. In a very short span, the platform has gained mass popularity in the region, and have also acquired huge investments from the gaming industry giants like Tencent.

Nimo TV is a perfect example of how big is the gaming industry. You can make millions even by focusing on some specific region or also by optimizing the platform for certain games.

If you have a similar idea in your mind and thinking about starting your own live game streaming website, this article will help you do so in very less investments. You will learn how to start a live video game streaming site and monetize it with trending revenue generation channels.

Let’s go one step after another

Step 1: Choose a live streaming solution

There are two ways to complete this step.

Option 1: Get live streaming software and build your website around it

Live streaming software is responsible for accommodating every software solution required for streaming and playing the stream on a device. You will find various live streaming software in the market to choose from, for example, Dacast, Wowza, and IBM Cloud Video. However, to get the best experience make sure the software is equipped with the following APIs:

• Encoder API
• Streaming server API
• Decoder/Media player API

An encoder API encodes the media file of your stream into various data packets and sends each data packet to the streaming server API. The streaming server then uses a network to route these data packets to the requesting device. Then comes the decoder API, which collects these data packets in a buffer and then decodes them back as a media files before pushing them on the media player for playing the live stream.

The entire process is continued as long as the stream is live. As it is quite a complex process and takes some time to encode, route, decode and them play the stream, a network latency occurs, which causes some delay on the real-time playback.

To tackle this, streaming servers are connected to a Content Delivery Network, which makes the routing fast enough to experience negligible network latency. A CDN uses powerful edge servers located in various regions for faster content delivery.

So your live streaming software must consist of at least the above-explained APIs. The software itself would have its dedicated API that you can embed while designing the UI and the entire website.  Depending on your business model, aimed UX, and your knowledge on How to make a streaming website, you can add different features to your site.

Option 2: Get a complete suite of live streaming software and a turnkey script

It takes some time to develop a website and embed the live streaming software in it. It takes a lot of research to identify the trends, necessities, and business opportunities before you can implement them on your website design. Typical website design would take months and lots of dollars.

That’s why developers these days have come up with open-source and ready-made website solutions. Call them turnkey scripts or clone scripts, the meaning is same. They come with a ready-made website UI, Admin Panel, embedded live streaming software, and everything else one needs to start a live game streaming site in minutes.

Some of these solutions like ‘StreamNow’ also come bundled with ready-made mobile apps, which saves a lot of time and money. With just a one-time payment, you get a whole suite of website, live streaming software, and mobile apps. It’s a fair trade considering the fortunes it takes to develop everything from scratch.

So these are two options, you can select from. Now it depends on your choice, if you want a ready-made live streaming solution, or prefer re-inventing the wheel with a customized experience and your understanding of How to make a streaming website. However, you can also customize these ready-made solutions as they come with open-source code.

Step 2: Design and build your monetization channels

Of course, you want to make money with your live video game streaming site. You are not doing it just for fun. The video game live streaming niche these days is using both traditional and contemporary revenue channels to make money.

Here is the basic nature. A live streaming site allows various gamers to create their profiles and stream live gameplay. In return, the site uses its revenue channels to make money and share the revenue with the streamers.

1. Ads model: The most effective and oldest revenue channel is embedding various kinds of Ads on the site and earn from the advertisers. Be it a video roll Ad, search Ad, or Banner Ad, you can use them all to make some good Ad money.
2. Subscription model: The subscription model works on two levels. One, users can pay and subscribe to the website itself for ad-free browsing and other benefits, for example, YouTube Premium/ YouTube Red. Two, users can pay and subscribe to their favorite streamers and support them for example, YouTube channel membership.
3. Transaction model: This channel is not effective for regular game streaming. However, you can use to for event streaming, where you can ask users to purchase the particular stream’s access to watch it. For example, you can monetize live e-sports coverage.

If you are designing your website from the scratch, you would need integrating all these revenue channels on your site with the required Payment Gateway APIs, subscription APIs, and Ad Network APIs. You would also need to code the revenue split logic and channel monetization rules.

However, if you are going for a ready-made live streaming solution, you would find all these streaming revenue channels already embedded on the site. As you would have the source code, you can also customize the revenue channels as per your own business model.

Step 3: Select hosting solution(s) for your website

Once your site is ready, the only big thing is hosting it for the live audience. A live streaming platform is not a regular website you can host on any web server. You would need a combination of different types of hosts to manage different aspects of live streaming.

Web host: This one is a traditional website hosting server. You can choose from an array of dedicated web hosts from the market. Avoid shared servers as they are slow and not suitable for video streaming sites. Also, you would need to host your mobile apps on their dedicated app stores.

Video streaming server/platform: These are special servers designed to host videos files. Though web servers can also host your video files, it will only make your website slow and full of buffering. It’s better to host website files and video files on dedicated servers. For example, Digital Ocean is a good website server, but you still need a video streaming server like Wowza in addition.

Content Delivery Network (CDN): Now that you have hosted your site and video files on their dedicated servers, you need someone to manage the content delivery. A CDN is a collection of several edge-severs as explained above in the article. It manages content delivery and makes the stream faster and delay-free by caching the data packets on the edge servers.

Enjoy streaming live gameplays

After your site is live, it’s all about marketing and brand building now to acquire users. You can further implement many other optimizations to make your website seamless and user-friendly. For example, you can integrate the live streaming managers like OBS, or use a ready-made platform that comes inbuilt with OBS, LiveStream, or Dacast support. These are some awesome live stream managers that take the live game streaming experience to the next level.