The Complete Guide to Streaming on Mixer

Published in

The Emergence

5 min readMar 15, 2018

Initially launched in January 2016, Mixer was bought by Microsoft in the summer of 2017 and re-branded from the original name of Beam.

But what makes Mixer so good? Can it compete with the likes of Twitch and what do you need to do to get started on the platform?

Mixer pride themselves on having the lowest stream latency (so, when you follow a streamer, the notification instantly appears) and the most interactive features compared to the likes of Twitch (although Extensions have caught Twitch up!)

While this is true, it has not yet helped it attain the community and viewership such as Twitch. Recent data from the likes of Streamlabs have put Mixer as the 4th biggest streaming platform behind Twitch, YouTube Live and Facebook.

This is likely going to change with August’s news on Ninja moving to Mixer as his main platform!

(If you are looking for all the alternative places to stream instead of Twitch… here’s six more)

Six Alternative Streaming Platforms to Twitch

Choose your streaming platform wisely, there are plenty of alternative platforms other than Twitch.

medium.com

You can find Mixer’s Android and iOS apps here:

There isn’t currently a PS4 app for it because… XBOX. Obviously.

Manage Channel

Upon the creation of your account (which is also a Microsoft account), Mixer provides broadcasters with the following menu. Let’s run through it quickly!

Broadcast

This is where you are able to name your stream, set a description and share the game you are playing. It displays your stream key to be plugged into the likes of OBS and Xplit (p.s. never share this to anyone…)

There is also room for streamers to customise their preferences including:

Hosting message
Subscriber announcement
Follower announcement
Whether you want to keep recordings of your streams as VODs (yes you should)
Whether your VODs should be auto-played when you are offline (I recommend you do this)

There are further options to edit the level of automated chat moderation with 4 different levels of severity, off, low, medium and high. Any family-friendly streamers must look at the ‘high’ level to keep swearing and inappropriate content off their stream chat.

Customise

Here is where you edit and customise your channel biography, logo, cover image, offline image and channel introduction.

VODS

This is where your VODs (videos-on-demand) are stored. VODs are kept for 14 days on Mixer. This is upped to 90 days when you are a Mixer Partner.

Users

The user dashboard allows you to easily manage your moderators (known as editors and mods on Mixer).

This is also the place to manage any trolls or negative people you have banned from your Mixer stream.

Analytics

Mixer’s analytics are pretty detailed and useful for streamers, they allow you to see:

Views
Followers
Sparks
Country-specific demographics

The most interesting part of analytics is found at the bottom called ‘Top Games this Week’. Here it shows the most popular games on Mixer over the past seven days based on the number of views, streams and shares. This is an incredibly useful insight to show which games have the potential to help your stream grow (and shouldn’t be ignored by Twitch streamers too!).

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Your Network

A simple interface that shows who you follow, and who follows you. Initially really valuable for new streamers, I can imagine this becomes pretty messy after a few weeks & months of streaming.

Mixer promote teams heavily and these can be made by anyone, but cost 5000 ‘sparks’ (loyalty points you gain while viewing content on Mixer).

Additional cool things from Mixer

When you land on your own personal channel, you are able to:

Host somebody
Start a co-stream

Or even play interactive experiences with your chat — these are games that have had streaming interaction built into their gameplay. For example the Darwin Project — which allows viewers to vote for benefits during a game — and Surgeon Simulator — which lets viewers control your fingers as you try and save your patients.