Streaming Equipment

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What Streaming Equipment Do I Need?

Streaming can be as simple as hitting a button on your console's controller or as in-depth as building a full-on studio in your house. Here's the key streaming equipment you'll need to get started.

Microphone

If you want to build and retain and audience while streaming, it's best to have some sort of live interaction with your chat. Otherwise, they might as well be watching a pre-recorded video. A microphone is the primary gateway to your audience, letting you react to messages and notifications as soon as they pop up. On the flipside, a crackling, popping microphone is a surefire way to turn away anyone who happens upon your stream. No one wants to suffer through a low-quality microphone, no matter how good the rest of your stream may be.

You can use your gaming headset's microphone when you're just starting out, but a standalone microphone is a massive set up in quality. The streaming microphones we stock here at Ebuyer connect to your computer via USB, so they're just as easy-to-use as any other USB-powered peripheral. To get the most out of your new microphone, you'll want to mount it to a microphone arm so that it doesn't pick up vibrations against your desk, or the sound of a clicky mechanical keyboard.

Camera & Lighting

Some of the world's top streamers carry their streams through chat interaction, insightful commentary, or sheer gaming prowess alone. You don't exactly need a camera pointed at your face when you're intently focused on beating a game as fast as possible, for example. That being said, streams with 'face cams' do tend to get higher viewership and interaction on average.

As you camera feed is going to occupy a relatively small portion of your stream, a high-definition webcam will be of decent enough quality. It's best to pick one up that's capable of recording at 60 frames-per-second if you plan to stream at 60 FPS, too. And what's a camera without lighting? Rather than relying on the glow of your monitor to illuminate your face, having a dedicated key light (or two) is a much more adjustable, reliable solution.

Gaming PC

Most modern consoles feature the ability to stream directly to popular streaming sites, like Twitch and YouTube. However, it's all done through a rather barebones app that doesn't let you customise the appearance of your stream to any significant degree. You're stuck with that bog-standard 'default' look, which won't help your stream stand out from the crowd.

If you want to inject a lot of personality into your stream by messing around with overlays, transitions, and plug-ins, you can do so on PC. But do keep in mind that you need a fairly capable gaming PC to run both the streaming software and the game itself simultaneously.

It's for this reason NVIDIA graphics cards are generally recommended for streaming. Their 'NVENC' video encoder offers up good image quality while only having a marginal impact on your system's performance. And while a fast 6-core processor and 16GB of memory may be enough for gaming, it's worth stepping up to an 8-core CPU and 32GB of RAM to account for the performance overhead of streaming software. Lastly, given the nature of streaming, you'll want to hook your PC up to the internet via a wired ethernet connection to help minimise network interruptions.

Monitor

While it's possible to stream on a single monitor, it's more effort than it's worth. You'll have to alt-tab out of your game constantly to check if you've dropped frames, if the audio's too loud, and so on, which'll just kill the flow and enjoyment of your stream. Having your broadcasting software and stream chat open on a secondary monitor, so that it's only a quick glance away, will help massively.

As this secondary monitor isn't for playing games on, it doesn't have to be anything fancy, either. Though you may want to put it on a monitor arm and position it vertically, so that you can read more chat messages at once. If you're dipping your toes into the world of streaming and don't want to buy a secondary monitor just yet, you can always pull your stream chat up on your smartphone or tablet in the meantime.

Green Screen, Capture Card, & More

Of course, there's a bunch of optional but nice-to-have pieces of streaming equipment to take your stream to the next level. Once you've got your camera and lighting all set up properly, you'll be in a good position to install a green screen. If you want to play console games while streaming from a computer, you can grab the console's video feed and send it to your computer using a capture card. And since you'll be sitting for hours at a time, it's worth considering investing in a comfortable yet ergonomic office or gaming chair.

Streaming at Ebuyer

Here at Ebuyer, we've got all the streaming gear you need to get started from the top brands, including Elgato, Razer, and more. Spread the cost of your purchase with our flexible finance offers. And if you want your new streaming gear by tomorrow, next-day delivery is also available.