How to Stream to Telegram With OBS

settings_input_antenna What the address and the key actually are

Start a live broadcast in a channel the ordinary way and it uses the camera in your hand. Choose to stream from software instead, and Telegram hands you two strings: an address to send video to, and a key that identifies your stream. You paste both into the broadcasting application, it connects, and video starts arriving.

The part people skip is what happens next. Telegram shows you a preview of what is arriving before anybody else sees it. The broadcast is not live to your subscribers until you start it; until then you have a private rehearsal room with the exact picture and the exact sound your audience will get. Every first-broadcast disaster in this step is preventable in that window, and almost nobody uses it.

tune Settings that matter, and the ones that do not

Every guide to this subject contains a table of exact numbers. Ignore them, because the only number that matters is the one your own connection can hold for an hour.

The constraint is your upload, not your download. Home connections are lopsided, often severely, and the figure advertised to you describes the direction you are not using. Test your upload at the hour you intend to broadcast — an evening, when the household and the neighbourhood are also using it — and then choose a rate comfortably underneath what you measured. A stream that never stumbles at a modest quality is better in every way than one that looks sharp and breaks up twice.

Prefer a constant rate to a variable one. Variable rates exist to save space in recorded files. A live broadcast is judged on not breaking, so the predictable option is the right one.

Set the keyframe interval explicitly. Left automatic, an encoder inserts full frames when the picture changes a lot, which can mean long gaps during a talking-head broadcast. A viewer who arrives mid-stream cannot be shown anything until the next full frame comes along, so those gaps become people tapping in and staring at nothing for an uncomfortable while. An explicit interval of a couple of seconds costs almost no quality and removes the problem.

Resolution is a content decision disguised as a technical one. Your audience is on a phone. A full desktop share, or a slide with twenty lines of text on it, is unreadable at that size no matter what bitrate you push. The fix is bigger type, fewer things on screen, and sharing a region rather than a whole screen — not a higher number in the settings.

Hardware or software encoding is a question about spare capacity, not about quality. If the same machine is running the cameras, a browser and your notes, take the work off the processor and give it to the graphics hardware. If the machine is doing nothing else, it does not matter.

warning The two things that actually go wrong

Not the bitrate. It is always one of these.

Sound. The wrong input is selected, or a microphone is held by another application, or the clip you rolled in plays on your speakers and never reaches the stream. Viewers forgive a soft picture and leave over bad audio, and the failure is invisible to you because you can hear the room you are sitting in. The only real test is to watch your own preview on headphones before you go live — not to ask "can everyone hear me?" to an audience that arrived after you started.

Ending. Stopping the software stops video arriving; it does not necessarily close the session for the people watching, who are left looking at a frozen picture until somebody ends the broadcast in Telegram. Practise the finish as deliberately as the start. And if you want a recording, that choice belongs before or during — a broadcast that has ended without being recorded is simply gone, and for most channels the replay is watched by more people than the live one.

touch_app Try it now — five minutes

Four steps, and the first two are worth doing even if you never stream.

1. Measure your upload at broadcast time Not now, if now is a quiet hour. The number you need is the evening one, with the household online.
2. Make an empty channel and stream into it Watch your own preview on headphones. Check the sound, the framing, and whether your screen share is legible on a phone held at arm's length.
3. Practise the ending Stop the software, then finish the session in Telegram, then look at what the channel shows afterwards. Do it once here so you are not learning it in front of people.
4. Decide where the key lives Somewhere that is not a note on your desktop and not a window you might share. Then revoke and reissue it, so you know how.

forum Running the room when the chat is behind you

There is a delay between what you do and what viewers see, measured in seconds rather than milliseconds, and it changes how the conversation works.

Every question you read is about something you said a while ago. Answer with context rather than with "yes" — restate the question before answering it, because the person who asked has moved on and everybody else never saw it. This one habit is the difference between a broadcast that feels responsive and one that feels like two unrelated events.

You cannot present and read at once. In a channel broadcast the administrators speak and the subscribers watch; the interaction lives in reactions and in the comments below (Step 075). Nominate somebody to read them and hand you the two worth answering. Without that person, you will either ignore the room or lose your thread, and usually both in turn.

Simulcasting to several platforms is a trade, not a bonus. Software can duplicate your feed to more than one destination, which splits a single upload budget among them and, more importantly, scatters the conversation into rooms that nobody can follow at the same time. Choose the room where your people already are, and tell the others where you went.

Plan for the replay, because it is the larger audience. Most people who watch a live broadcast watch it afterwards. That argues for recording, for saying what the session is about in the first minute rather than the tenth, and for not building the whole thing around a live conversation that the replay audience cannot hear.

help Common questions at this stage