Store Broadcasts are a relatively new feature (which is officially still in beta!) for the Steam game store pages on steampowered.com and in the Steam app.
The idea is that store page maintainers can send live streams of interesting content for their games directly to the visitors of their store pages. Whenever a user visits a store page of a Steam game where there is a live broadcast ongoing, the video box will automatically expand and show the broadcast to the visitor.
A Broadcast Example: Live Stream on the Store Page of 'Floppy Knights' with 437 viewers
Just like in the well known video game streaming portal twitch.tv, there is a live chat displayed alongside the broadcast video. Contrary to twitch, the users of the Steam platform only rarely use the chat interaction - the live chats of most live streams on Steam remain unused and empty.
Another difference to twitch.tv is the fact that a live stream completely vanishes after it has been finished. Contrary to twitch.tv where past streams can still be watched for some time, this is not possible with Stream Broadcasts.
A random selection of games with an currently active live stream is displayed on the Steam store frontpage at all time. This is a potencial, free, additional link to your Steam store page on the Steam frontpage!
Selection of Steam Broadcasts on the Steam Store Frontpage - some with over 10000 viewers!
And then there are many different Steam events happening througout the year. Those events are displayed more prominently in the Steam store and when used wisely, can result in thousands of Steam wishlist additions in the course of two or three days.
So Steam broadcasts are an interesting marketing tool to get your game displayed to more customers in the Steam store - and provide useful information at the same time.
And since Steam explicitly allows game developers or publishers to broadcast pre-recorded video as well, RoboStreamer can be used as an additional marketing tool for your Steam store page.
Because Steam Broadcasts are designed with live streams in mind, there is no way of uploading a video file for a broadcast on Steam. Every stream must be sent via RMTP - a live stream network protocol.
So for the duration of your Broadcast, some software need to continuously send data to Steam. This can either be done by always leaving your computer running and using some software like OBS, or through RoboStreamer where you can simply upload the video you want to broadcast. The RoboStreamer servers will take care of the continuous live stream.
Its literally just upload and press play.
You have a question or just want to talk?
You can reach out by mail or find RoboStreamer on Twitter or join my RoboStreamer Discord Server.
I am always available for a chat (just sometimes, I need to sleep a few hours)!
