Caps and states

Two things worth being clear on before you go out: how much bitrate your key takes, and what the Status on that row is telling you.

Bitrate cap per plan

Plan	Key cap	Cloud OBS output
Stream Key Lite	9,000 kbps	—
Stream Key	9,000 kbps	—
OBS Basic	6,000 kbps	4,000 kbps
OBS Standard	6,000 kbps	5,000 kbps
OBS Pro	10,000 kbps	8,000 kbps

The key cap is what can come in. The output is what your Cloud OBS publishes on your channel. They’re different numbers, and the second one is what rules what your audience sees: pushing in more bitrate than can go out improves nothing.

How to set your encoder up

1. Set your encoder’s bitrate below your plan’s cap.
2. Leave room: on mobile the real bitrate swings around, and if your encoder does adaptive bitrate, what you set is the ceiling.
3. If you genuinely need more, the way forward is changing plan (Change plan), not pushing the encoder.

Steady beats high

In IRL, a stream at a moderate bitrate that doesn’t drop looks better than a high one that cuts out every three streets. Start conservative and go up once you know how your route behaves. Threshold guide in Unstable bitrate.

When you change plan

The cap in the table is your current plan’s. If you change plan, your keys move to the new cap on their own: you don’t have to rotate them or copy anything again.

• Moving up, if the new plan comes with more keys, the missing ones show up in the list on their own, each with its URLs.
• Moving down, if it comes with fewer, the most recent ones stop working and go to Revoked. The main one, the first you had, is always kept, so the publish URL you have in your encoder still holds. The dashboard tells you which ones before you confirm.

Detail in Change plan.

The states of the key

In the Status column of Stream Keys:

State	What it means	What you do
Streaming	Your signal is coming in right now	Nothing. You’re in. On the dashboard you’ve got the Current bitrate
No signal	The key is valid, but nothing is arriving	Check that your encoder is broadcasting and that its URL is the one for the current region and protocol. See My feed isn’t arriving
No subscription	That key’s subscription isn’t active	Go to Billing. If you cancelled and you’re still inside the period, hit Reactivate (Cancel and reactivate)

There are two more states that describe the key itself, not the signal:

State	What it means	What you do
Active	The key is still valid and takes your signal	Nothing
Revoked	The key is worthless: it doesn’t authenticate and its URLs don’t work	It’s what happens to a key when its subscription expires. Reactivate it from Billing; if you think it’s a mistake, open a ticket in Support

Note

Streaming is not the same as Active. A key can be perfectly active and receiving nothing: that’s No signal, and it’s almost always the encoder’s doing.

When the subscription expires

It’s the case that scares people most and it has a simple explanation: when a subscription expires, its keys are deactivated and its Cloud OBS goes Suspended. You don’t lose your setup by expiring; access is switched off. As soon as the subscription is active again, you’re broadcasting again.

Your stream history

On each key’s detail page, Stream history keeps your latest streams: Start, Duration, Avg bitrate, Data and Drops. A coverage blip of under a minute does not open a new stream: it counts as a drop inside the same one. The monthly summary and your last stream are on the home dashboard (Your home dashboard).

See also

• What a stream key is — how many keys you have and where you see them.
• The publish URL — half the “No signal” cases come from here.
• Plans and pricing — what cap each plan brings.