How to stream your Xbox One on Beam

How to stream your Xbox games on Microsoft's newly acquired Beam live streaming service.

What on earth is Beam you might be asking? I thought everyone streamed on Twitch or YouTube? A relative upstart in the streaming game has been scooped up by the Redmond giant and suddenly found itself in the limelight.

So you might find yourself wondering how to get started with it and share your Xbox One games (other consoles are available!) with the world. Twitch is built in to the Xbox One for simple streaming but with Beam, at least for now, you'll need some additional hardware and software.

That hardware will be a capture card, such as the Elgato HD60S and your PC, as well as some broadcasting software. In that regard two of the most popular options are Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) which is free, and XSplit which requires a subscription for the full feature set.

N.B. We'll be using OBS as a demonstration for this guide, but many of the steps should be similar on XSplit. It's also worth noting you need to download the newer, OBS Studio software and not OBS Classic for Beam streaming.

Before any of this you'll need to sign up for a free account over on the Beam website. You can either sign up using email or log in with Twitter or Discord.

1. On your Beam dashboard select Hub from the sidebar menu on the right hand side of the screen.

2. Select Setup stream from the screen that now displays.

3. When asked how you want to stream, select use RTMP.

4. The best server should be selected automatically based on location and latency, but you can change this here. Next, copy your stream key from the highlighted box.

That's all you need to do for now on the Beam website, next fire up your broadcasting software, in this case OBS Studio.

1. Select Settings in OBS Studio.

2. Select the Stream tab on the left hand sidebar.

3. Select beam.pro from the dropdown box for desired streaming service. In the box below paste the stream key you copied from your Beam dashboard.

4. If you're using XSplit there are some slightly different steps to setting up your stream key. You'll need the streaming URL and the stream key from your Beam dashboard in order to get hooked up there.

That's about all there is to it. These basic steps will help you set up your Beam account for streaming, but there are other things to consider, such as bitrate. Beam recommends what you should use in your dashboard, in our case it's showing as 720p, 30fps and a maximum 2500kbps bitrate. You'll need to take these into account in your broadcast software as you set up your stream.

We don't know yet what the future holds for Beam, but if you're interested in seeing what it's all about, be sure to give Windows Central a follow!