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How to start streaming on Twitch in 2026

9 min read · Facts checked

You do not need expensive gear, a big personality, or a plan for going viral to start streaming. You need an account, free software, and about an hour. This guide takes you from nothing to live on Twitch, in order, with no steps skipped.

1. Create and secure your Twitch account

  1. Sign up at twitch.tv. Your username is your brand and changing it later breaks every link people have shared, so spend a few minutes on it. Short, easy to spell out loud, and easy to search for beats clever.
  2. Turn on Two-Factor Authentication immediately. Settings → Security and Privacy → Set Up Two-Factor Authentication. This is not optional advice: 2FA is a hard requirement for monetization later, and you cannot join the Affiliate program without it. Doing it now saves you a scramble at the finish line.
  3. Verify your email address, or you will hit a wall during Affiliate onboarding.
  4. Fill in your About panel and profile picture. An empty channel reads as abandoned to anyone who clicks in.

2. Install OBS Studio

OBS Studio is the free software that captures your game, your camera, and your microphone, mixes them together, and sends the result to Twitch. It is the industry standard and it costs nothing.

Download it only from [obsproject.com](https://obsproject.com). Fake OBS download sites are one of the most common ways new streamers get malware — search ads in particular are frequently malicious. We keep a verified list of official app links for exactly this reason.

On first launch, OBS offers an Auto-Configuration Wizard. Run it. It will benchmark your machine and pick reasonable starting settings. Then check its numbers against our OBS settings calculator, which factors in your actual upload speed and your platform's current bitrate limits — the wizard tends to be optimistic about upload.

3. Connect OBS to your Twitch account

  1. In OBS: Settings → Stream.
  2. Service: Twitch.
  3. Click Connect Account (recommended) and log in. This is safer and easier than copying a stream key, and it unlocks extras like OBS reading your chat and updating your stream title.
  4. If you use a stream key instead, treat it like a password. Anyone with your key can broadcast to your channel. Never show it on stream — and if you ever do, reset it immediately in your Creator Dashboard.

4. Build your scenes

A scene is a layout. A source is one thing inside it — a game, a camera, an image. Most streamers run three or four scenes and switch between them. Start with these:

  • Starting Soon — a static image or text plus music, shown for the first 5–10 minutes while people arrive.
  • Main — your game capture plus your webcam and any alerts. This is where you spend the stream.
  • Be Right Back — for bathroom and snack breaks, so you never have to end the broadcast.
  • Ending — a thank-you screen for the last minute or two.

Adding your game

  • PC games: add a Game Capture source and set Mode to *Capture specific window*. Game Capture performs better than Display Capture and will not accidentally broadcast your desktop notifications.
  • Console (PS5 / Xbox): you need a capture card, which passes your console's video through to your PC. Add it as a Video Capture Device source. Our gear finder includes capture cards in console kits automatically.
  • Just Chatting / IRL: add your webcam as a Video Capture Device and make it full-screen.

Adding your camera and mic

Add a Video Capture Device for your webcam (optional — plenty of successful streamers never show their face) and confirm your microphone appears under Audio Mixer. Speak and watch the meter: it should bounce in the green-to-yellow range and only rarely touch red. Red means clipping, which sounds like distortion and cannot be fixed after the fact.

5. Check your settings before you go live

Run your numbers through the OBS settings calculator — it asks for your upload speed and PC, then gives you the exact bitrate, resolution, FPS, and encoder to enter. The short version of what it is protecting you from:

  • Bitrate too high for your upload is the number one cause of dropped frames and a stuttering stream. Never use your full upload speed — leave headroom for everything else on your network.
  • Twitch caps most channels around 6,000 kbps. Going higher does not improve quality, it just breaks your stream. (Channels in Enhanced Broadcasting can go higher — see the calculator.)
  • Use your GPU encoder if you have one — NVENC on NVIDIA, AMF on AMD, Apple VT on Mac. It takes the encoding load off your CPU, so your game keeps running smoothly.
  • 1080p60 is not always the right answer. If your upload or PC cannot sustain it, 720p60 looks dramatically better than a stuttering 1080p.

6. Set your title and category

In your Creator Dashboard, set your stream title and category before you hit Go Live. Twitch's browse pages are organized by category, and an uncategorized stream is effectively invisible. Add tags too — they are one of the few discovery levers a brand-new channel actually has.

7. Go live

Click Start Streaming in OBS. Open your channel on your phone (not your PC — that causes audio feedback) to confirm the video and audio look right. Then talk.

The hardest part of a first stream is talking to an empty chat. It feels ridiculous. Do it anyway — commentate what you are doing, explain your decisions, react out loud. Viewers who arrive need something to walk into. A silent stream gives a newcomer no reason to stay, and a lurker who does not speak up is still a viewer worth talking to.

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