Yesterday Nathan and I recorded an episode of Ikiguys, and for the first time we livestreamed it. I thought YouTube had a restriction where you needed 1,000 subscribers to do so, but it appears that isn't the case if you use your computer at home. Which got me thinking, this is quite a powerful tool. The ability to share your ideas with whoever's interested instantly and through video is quite remarkable. All you need is a computer with a decent Internet connection, and you too can make your own streaming powerhouse. Of course to make it something good, you'll need to have good ideas, but part of being able to share ideas is having practice at sharing ideas, and what better place to start than a YouTube livestream?

For the past two years, I've been writing this blog religiously. It may not be the best quality, I'd say about 90% of the posts probably aren't relevant to the majority of people, but there are some genuine gems in there that deserve greater thought, and posting them on YouTube might be a great way to do that, which is easily done with Livestreaming. Just like this blog, I'm thinking of doing a livestream each day. The aim has always been to improve my communication skills, and talking is one great way to do just that. I'm also thinking of other potential for this medium too, such as interviews with some of the people I've met during my time in Japan.

Now for the technical stuff, we went in with zero knowledge, and Nathan found a program called OBS that you can use for free to set up a stream. There were a few niggles of course, we couldn't get Nate's volume even with mine, and the video was a bit sketchy, so I'm going to have to do something about that in the future. However, it was easy enough, you connect feeds to OBS, share the stream key with YouTube, click start streaming, and you're off to the races.

Now all I need is a decent Internet connection, which I'm going to have to wait for as we're moving house, and right now the Internet companies are busy with high demand due to a little virus. Or is this just and excuse?