Getting started with failover

By the end you’ll have a failover channel running: your signal passes through to your platform as-is and, when it drops, your offline screen covers the gap until you’re back.

You need: a Failover plan · your encoder · your platform’s URL and stream key · 10 minutes

Where it sits

Failover goes in the middle: your encoder no longer broadcasts to your platform, it broadcasts to the failover channel, and it’s the channel that talks to Twitch (or to whatever RTMP destination you give it). While your signal is arriving, it lets it through. When it stops arriving, it splices in your offline screen without closing the broadcast, and goes back to your signal the moment you reconnect.

Note

It’s for whoever broadcasts from their own OBS. It doesn’t matter what you stream: IRL, gameplay and Just Chatting all benefit the same. What failover covers is your connection dropping while you’re the one holding the broadcast up. It doesn’t include stream keys: the channel comes with its own ingest key.

Streaming with Cloud OBS?

Then you already have failover and you don’t need this product. The one talking to your platform is the Cloud OBS, so your broadcast doesn’t cut out when you lose coverage: automatic scene switching jumps to your Offline scene and returns to your signal when you reconnect.

Steps

1. Subscribe to a failover plan from Billing → Get new product, the Failover category. There are three, and the only thing that changes is the bitrate cap: Plans and pricing.
2. Set up the destination in Account → Streaming channels → Add channel, with your platform’s RTMP server (optional) and Platform stream key (optional). Without those two the channel has nothing to broadcast to: Destinations.
3. Open Failover in the side menu. You’ll see Create your failover channel: type a name (Main IRL, for example) and hit Create channel.
4. Wait for the status to go from Setting up to Idle. Refresh the page if it takes a while.
5. In the Destination column, pick the streaming channel from step 2.
6. In the Grace column, choose how long your stream should hold on while you’re down: 2 min, 5 min or 10 min: Grace window.
7. Hit Offline screen and upload the image or video that plays while there’s no signal: Offline screen.
8. Copy the URL in the Ingest column with the copy button and paste it into your encoder as the publish URL. Next to the channel name you have its protocol and its bitrate cap (for example, SRT · 5 Mbps): don’t go above that.
9. Broadcast. As soon as your signal arrives the channel goes to Live and your platform goes live.

Paste the whole URL

If your channel is SRT, the URL already carries the streamid with your key inside it. Paste it as it is; don’t split it or retype it by hand.

Not working?

What you see	What it means	What to do
You don’t have any failover channels yet and the View plans button	You have no active failover subscription	Subscribe to a failover plan from Billing
You’ve reached the … backup channels included in your plan. Delete one or upgrade your plan.	It’s one channel per subscription	Use the one you already have, or subscribe to another failover plan
The channel … is missing its stream URL or key. Fill them in and try again.	The destination is half set up	Go to Account → Streaming channels, edit it and fill in both fields
The channel stays on Idle even though you’re broadcasting	Your signal isn’t reaching the channel	Check that you pasted the URL from the Ingest column (not your platform’s) and that you’re not going over the bitrate cap

Next step

• Destinations: where you get your platform’s URL and key.
• Offline screen: what to upload and what to avoid.
• Grace window: what happens if you take a while to come back.