No. Anyone with your room link can join, chat, and be on camera without signing up for anything. Only hosting — creating a studio and going live — requires a Streamboth account.
Chrome or Edge give you the full feature set, including live captions (which rely on Chrome's built-in speech recognition). Camera and microphone access need a real browser with device permissions — it won't work in an embedded/in-app browser.
No. Everything — the video mixing, layouts, branding, recording, and streaming — runs in the browser tab itself. There's nothing to download.
Streamboth connects everyone directly to each other (no cloud media server in between), which works great for a handful of guests in one room. It isn't built to scale to dozens of simultaneous participants.
Yes — your RTMP URL and stream key are only ever sent from your browser to your own account's server process, which is what actually connects to YouTube/Twitch/Facebook. They're never sent or stored anywhere else.
Yes, local recording is completely independent of Go Live — record straight to a file on your machine, pause and resume as needed, with no live destination required at all.
Hosting duties automatically hand off to a co-host, or another participant if there's no co-host. Because compositing happens in the browser, we'd still recommend keeping whoever's actually producing the show's tab open and focused for the full broadcast or recording.
Yes — the Destination tab accepts any custom RTMP URL and stream key, not just the built-in YouTube/Twitch/Facebook presets.
Streamboth runs entirely in your browser, which can't speak NDI directly. The workaround: install the free NDI Virtual Input tool, point it at your NDI source, and it'll show up in Streamboth's camera list like any other webcam — no code, no plugin needed on our end.
Guests can join from a phone browser to be on camera. Hosting and producing — layouts, branding, Cut, Destinations — is built for a desktop browser and isn't optimized for a small screen yet.
"Live" in Streamboth means the relay to that platform started — it's a good sign, but it doesn't guarantee the platform has accepted and is showing the stream yet. We'd recommend testing against an unlisted/private stream first before going live for real.