Streaming Equipment

By Truthiness, in Star Wars: Armada Off-Topic

For those of you that stream games and/or are in the know: what kind of equipment would I need to look into if Steel Command were to expand into streaming? The NOVA Region has some big events, and it feels a shame that nobody streams any of them.

To get started with it you won't need much. When our group got going with ours it was a £15 phone tripod, an old phone that we had sat around, and an extra long charging cable. Gets the job done for a cheap basic setup, if you're on wifi at the venue you can stream direct from that to your platform of choice, otherwise invest in a sizeable memory card and upload later.

Sadly we've not done any streaming in a while, the camera on the phone we were using is busted so need to replace that.

If you're looking to do bigger events or higher quality streams then you'll likely want a better tripod/boom to get a good overhead view (especially with Armada's 6x3 setup), a decent quality USB webcam (Logitech seemed to be a popular brand in articles I read) with a long enough cable, and a laptop to record/stream with. There's a few decent bits of software out there to add overlays, can't recall which ones I'd looked at using but a quick search will find you some options I'm sure.

But yeah, best advice I took from talking to one of the European X-Wing streaming crowd was not to get carried away, and start with something simple. Better to have some content that you can put out there than to get caught up in worrying about high-tech gear and a polished end product and never actually producing anything.