Regions

The region is the place your signal comes in through. Every key has its own and you change it from the dashboard in two clicks.

What it is

Your signal doesn’t travel to the end of the world: it comes in through the server of whichever region you picked and carries on from there. The closer that entry point is to where you’re broadcasting from, the less ground each packet covers, the less latency you pile up and the less you ask of your mobile connection.

The region lives inside the publish URL: that’s why changing it changes the URL.

The ones available right now

Region	Comes in through	Good if you broadcast from
EU	Frankfurt	Europe, North Africa, the Middle East
US	New York	North and South America
Asia	Singapore	South-East Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, India

The dropdown is the source of truth: if we open a new region it shows up there on its own.

How to pick it

1. Go to Stream Keys.
2. In the Region dropdown on the row, look at the regions available right now.
3. Pick the one closest to where you’re going to broadcast from — not to where your audience lives, and not to where you broadcast later.

If you’re going away and you’ll be broadcasting from somewhere else for several days, change it before you leave. For one afternoon’s walk it isn’t worth it.

What happens when you change it

Picking another region gets you the Region updated notice, naming the key you changed. It doesn’t show you the URL: that would put your key on screen. From that moment:

• The publish URL is a different one. Copy it again with Publish and paste it into your encoder. This is the step everybody forgets.
• Your key doesn’t change. It’s still the same one: you don’t have to rotate anything.
• The dashboard is waiting for your signal in the new region. If your encoder is still pointing at the previous one, the Status will sit on No signal even though you’re broadcasting.
• The playback URL changes too, so update it wherever you put it (The playback URL).

Don’t change it mid-stream

Changing region forces you to reconfigure the encoder, and that means cutting. Do it before you start, not when you’re already walking down the street.

The Cloud OBS region is a different thing

If you have Cloud OBS, your server has its own region, and it’s picked when it’s created: it’s the Choose the region for your Cloud OBS server step in the first-time wizard. We create it in the closest place with capacity available to what you pick.

That region doesn’t change from a dropdown: to move it you have to regenerate the server, and regenerating wipes scenes, settings and assets. Think it through first.

And they don’t have to match. Cloud OBS servers live in Europe today, so if you broadcast from Asia or the Americas the opposite is the norm: you pick the region closest to you for the key, your signal comes in there, and from that point it travels to your server.

That’s what you want. The leg that ruins a stream is the first one — phone to the nearest mast and on to the entry point — because that’s where coverage is patchy, cells hand over and packets get lost. Shortening it is what keeps your bitrate steady. The next hop, entry point to your server, runs over cable and doesn’t surprise anyone.

The trade-off: broadcasting from far away adds a little delay before the picture reaches your channel. You gain stability and pay tenths of a second.

If you don’t know which one to pick

Try the closest one and look at the result: if the bitrate holds steady and the latency doesn’t shoot up, that’s the one. If you see cuts or constant RTT spikes, try another and compare on the same route. The signals to watch are in Unstable bitrate.

See also

• The publish URL — what else changes it besides the region.
• Caps and states — what each state is telling you.