SharePlay Just Opened Its Doors, and I'm Not Sure the Internet Noticed

SharePlay posted on X that they'd gone open beta, no invites needed anymore. Create an account, go live, that's the whole story. I brought it up on stream because, honestly, most people watching had probably never heard of SharePlay at all, and that's kind of the point of this whole thing.

What Open Beta Actually Means Here

SharePlay has been around for about two years now. It went through a pre-1.0 alpha, disappeared for a stretch, and came back invite-only, which meant you needed someone to vouch for you just to start streaming. As of this week, that's gone. You sign up, you go live, no gatekeeping.

I pulled up the site live on stream to show what that actually looks like right now, and it's humbling in a good way. There were four or five people streaming at once. That's it. Compare that to Twitch, which is an entirely different scale of animal, and SharePlay looks less like a competitor and more like a tiny neighborhood shop next door to a big box store.

Small Team, Small Community, Real Tradeoffs

SharePlay is run by what sounds like maybe a couple of people, based out of Atlanta. A US-based team building a streaming platform from the ground up is genuinely cool to me, but it comes with real tradeoffs. Something breaks, it might take a minute to get fixed, because there's no massive engineering org behind it. On the flip side, a small team can move faster and try things that Twitch or YouTube can't, because they don't have shareholders to answer to.

What actually sold me on the community side is the Discord. People post support tickets, and they get handled quickly, and just as often, someone else in the community jumps in and answers a technical question before the team even sees it. That's the kind of thing that only works at a small scale, and it's worth something.

Why I'm Not Streaming to SharePlay Yet

Here's the part that stings a little. I'd love to be streaming to SharePlay right now, but Ecamm, which is what I use, doesn't play nice with SharePlay's current infrastructure. The data goes out fine on my end, but something on SharePlay's side isn't compatible with it. So for now I'm sticking with Twitch and YouTube.

My workaround idea, and this is very much a "someday" project, is spinning up Meld Studio, routing a virtual camera into Meld, and streaming from Meld into SharePlay instead. Filed that one away for a future stream.

The Multi-Streaming Rabbit Hole

This turned into a real conversation about multi-streaming in general. St. Clinton mentioned using Beam, which runs a multi-stream option for about five bucks a month, and he's currently pushing out to nine different places at once. I used to do something similar back in the day, streaming to Livestream, Twitch, YouTube, my own cast server, and a couple others, six platforms at one time. It's a legitimately good way to figure out where your community actually lives. The tradeoff is that keeping track of chat across that many platforms gets messy fast. Beam apparently does multi-chat now, which I haven't looked at in over a year, so that's on my list to revisit.

Streaming Platforms You've Probably Never Heard Of

If you're not US-centric, Twitch and YouTube aren't even necessarily your default options. Bilibili is a major live streaming platform out of China. SOOP, formerly known under a different name, serves as a big streaming platform out of Africa. And there's a very concrete reason some of these regional platforms exist: Twitch actually exited South Korea entirely a couple of years back because of how the country's telecom providers charge for both incoming and outgoing data. It got expensive enough that even with Amazon's backing, Twitch decided it wasn't worth staying.

Give SharePlay a Shot

If you haven't checked out SharePlay, now's the time. It costs nothing to make an account and start streaming. It's rough around some edges, which makes sense for an open beta, but if you run into something that doesn't work right, hop into their Discord and file a support ticket. That's exactly how a small platform like this gets better.