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Comment by saltedonion | Hacker News Reader

What’s preventing streamers from streaming to multiple platforms at once. Is it against he Eula or something ?

Monetization. The platforms require Affiliate/Partner streamers (so people with Subscribe buttons) to be exclusive streamers on their platform.

What if you're not a partner on the other platforms, can you still stream to Facebook, Youtube, Twitch, all at the same time? Smaller streams rely heavily on chat and interactions, but 1000+ viewer streams generally don't so you don't need to read 3 different chats. You can still receive donations and maybe ad money?

You can, but you will not get ad money (which requires Affiliate/partner).

then you can do it, and some streamers do.

The streamer known as Destiny and Giant Bomb sort of do this. They stream on Twitch but they accept monetization through alternative means. Destiny is actually exclusive to Twitch, he just hosts his streams on his own website and accepts subscriptions and donations there in addition to Twitch, all of his chat is on his own website though. Giant Bomb is not monetized through Twitch, it's monetized through CBS Interactive and hosted on their own site, but the stream is a Twitch stream. So they're not on multiple platforms, but they've not tied themselves to Twitch's monetization.

Why do you think this would help? Going from 0 to 1 viewers on one platform alone is quite hard, and then again for 1 to 10 viewers. You would have to put in that effort for each different platform, and ultimately you would still need to pick one and ditch the others once you qualify for partnership

As was implied in my comment, I was thinking of larger streamers with thousands of viewers that don't rely on chat. Someone like Ninja who gets 100k viewers could get a couple thousands more off other platforms potentially.

In addition to some of the other well-thought-out replies, much of the allure of streaming comes from live interaction, donations, chat, etc. Streaming to multiple platforms at once is more feasible for events like esports competitions, but would really make it difficult for a streamer to engage with their audience.

While it's a bit harder to engage with audiences on multiple platforms, it's definitely possible.

Since the communication direct is still mostly one way, you can e.g. aggregate all the chats from multiple platforms into a single one, and treat it like you would right now. Rocketbeans.tv, a German television-like streaming station that I watch a lot has a "superchat"[0] that does just that (which I think they built in-house), and it works really well. From a quick search, it looks like Restream.io also provides such a tool.

[0]: https://rocketbeans.tv/superchad/

not sure about others, but for twitch if you become a partner, required for most (all? don't remember) monetization you can't stream to other platform.

Yes. Applies to YouTube, Twitch, and other afaik.

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