Back when Rumble Studio was announced, I was excited about the vision they shared. An integrated multi-streaming service that incorporates the best of Rumble and a way to reach viewers on the other major players in the livestreaming space. I signed up the moment I saw I could signup for early access!
Much like Rumble itself being an alternative to YouTube, Rumble Studio offers an alternative to multi-streaming services like Restream.io and Stream Yard. With that in mind it's clear what Rumble has built, an easy to use streaming setup with very little fuss with things like stream keys, sources, scenes, and other things that inexperienced live streamers are just used to. For most creators this is great! With little effort, you can connect your various stream accounts (YouTube, X, Twitch, and Facebook) and you're off to sharing whatever content you want!
With the basics pretty much covered then let's talk about the stream experience itself. I did one test stream and found out pretty much what I needed from that one stream. I did like the ease at which I was able to start, I connected everything up, uploaded a thumbnail, titled the stream with a description, connected OBS virtual camera, and went live. Easy. Simple. Straightforward. I think that's the best thing about this entire experience. Literally anyone that can read could stream something.
The Test
For this test I streamed to Rumble, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook (kind-of), and X. Each platform felt basically in-sync with rumble with very little (if any) delay. One of my regulars on twitch popped in on Rumble and was watching side-by-side and was actually surprised at the latency. No one likes a laggy stream after-all. While live, I was able to see every single channel's view count (except Facebook [explanation coming]) and chat. This feature is top notch to be honest, know where people are watching and being able to read comments in one place is insanely convenient. Also compared to Restream's free tier, I'm hitting DOUBLE the platforms that could normally. So far so good then right? Well, the limitations start to show themselves from here on out.
Limitations abound
On the whole I fully understand this is a beta release and changes are coming and are planned. I just you to understand, I like Rumble Studio a ton so far but I would be remiss to not include the faults and caveats, especially for experienced streamers. Allow me to start with the technical settings first. Your stream is capped at 30fps with a bitrate around 4mbps. This is fine for podcasts, interviews, talk shows, etc... but I'm a gamer. Streaming high intensity games at 30fps is like a slideshow of my insanely mediocre skills. This was a bit of a bummer but the stream carried on anyway. I pulled up each platforms dashboard (except X because...well I don't think I was supposed to be able to broadcast to X to be honest). Every single dashboard (YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch here) gave me the same warnings/complaints: Keyframes are too low. They seem to be set at 4 but everyone recommends and defaults to 2 (even on auto, its likely 2).
Also while I'm on the technical side of things, not being able to broadcast into Rumble Studio via RTMP is FRUSTRATING. OBS Virtual Cam is fine and you get all of your OBS scenes and widgets this way but personally I would rather be able to send my stream to Rumble Studio at my preferred framerate, bitrate, and proper keyframes and then have the stream distributed from there. Currently Restream does exactly this and it's fine.
Now I'd imagine this is a combination of a first pass MVP (minimum viable product) and cost saving measures. Those extra frames per second, more frequent keyframes, and bandwidth have an associated cost. I'm sure Rumble is paying handsomely for API access to Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and X as well. In-fact, Restream charges a premium before you're even allowed to stream to facebook in any capacity OR custom RTMP endpoints so I get that the inital cost might be a bit high.
That being said, I would hope there's plans to allow streamers to customize their quality settings at some point in the works because at the current state, game streaming is not going to be a great experience. Nor would any high quality GIFS, videos, alerts, or other content a streamer might showcase to be fair.
A Note on Facebook
Now I have mentioned that Facebook had a few issues for this test stream and I'd like to get into that briefly. First of all, while Facebook streaming is on offer here, it's only to personal profiles (at least as far as I was able to login anyway). This may not be a big deal BUT I have an entire Facebook Gaming page dedicated to my content (though mostly reels, and instagram posts now). Streaming to my personal profile isn't something I'm interested in doing...at all. So I made use of the custom RTMP option in Rumble Studio and made it work just to see. This meant no chat, view count, or other integrations would work because I was merely sending a stream to facebook directly and not through their API. I figured this would be fair to metnion because I believe that level of API access comes at a premium. Otherwise why would Restream charge for Page Streaming but not other services? Maybe someone reading this knows better than I do but ideally this could be improved.
A Note on X
While I'm on a decent tangent, let's talk about X streaming. I am not an X Premium member. In fact, I've said that until I hit at least 1k followers on X I probably won't pay for it. As far as I can tell, streaming to X and access to their creator dashboard is a premium feature. So I was pleasantly surprised that my stream made it onto X and was on-par with the other platforms I was using. I don't know if this is a hole in the X api or expected behavior but this was neat nontheless.
Let's Talk About the Future
Now that I've gotten my (hopefully organized) thoughts out of the way, let's get into what the future could and should hold for Rumble Studio. These features would catapult Rumble and Rumble Studio far ahead of where they are currently while making other platforms look stingy (well stingier anyway) with thier features and support.
First off, I really hope they allow RTMP streaming directly to Rumble Studio. This would alleviate the keyframe, bitrate, and framerate issue for more experienced/techincal users immediately. Without this feature, I don't see gamers on Rumble making use of this tool much at all. Secondly, I would love to see the chat be rendered as a browser source in OBS or at least be able to be popped out. This would make it integrate into most existing OBS setups more nicely. While I'm on the subject of OBS, I would hope that a direct login integration would be on the horizon for OBS with the appropriate docks and such as well. Restream, YouTube, and Twitch all do this and it elminates the need for users to fool with RTMP much at all.
I would like to see Rumble be able to leverage their API access to pull events from connected platforms as well into a combined event/activity list. Recent Followers, Subscribers, Raids, Donations, etc... would all be extremely helpful in keeping up with every platform you're streaming to. This should also extend to chat filtering and moderation. I would love to be able to filter out known chat bots that only clutter up the chat feed and really on server those specific platforms themselves. Moderation tools are a must with any chat tool as well. I didn't try it but I don't think I could have taken any actions against a rogue Twitch or YouTube user who was just out to cause trouble. Lastly for the API access, I appreciate that the titles and descriptions made it over for the services that supported it but I would love to be able to add game Category, tags, and custom thumbnail as well.
Final Thoughts
All in all, what Rumble has been able to achieve both as a platform and with the beta release of Rumble Studio is amazing to see. Giving their users the tools to reach the maximum amount of people, even off platform, fits right in with Rumble's creator first mentality. I'm hopeful for what is coming down the pipe for Rumble Studio and can't wait to see what they do next. I hope my criticisms don't come off as mere complaining and griping. I've tried to offer solutions or at least logically understand why something is the way it is. I really want Rumble to succeed and tools like this are one of the best ways to ensure everyone can come to Rumble and share their voice.
P.S. I have no idea if this makes any sense and I haven't written anything this lengthy since college so please let me know if I've bungled up bigtime here.
