How to Add Overlays to your Live Streams

Stream overlays

Over the last few years, live streaming has become a prominent trend. One of the underlying factors that make your live stream professional and visually appealing is graphics. To make the broadcast look more polished and provide viewers with essential information, graphic elements in your live stream play a vital role. To build strong brand loyalty, attract new viewers, and create a loyal and engaged audience, it’s truly important to add the right graphics to your live stream in the form of stream overlays. Overlays help streamers to enhance their viewing experience.

Add a professional edge and make your live stream stand out in the crowd by using superb graphic overlays.

In this Article:

🎬 What are Stream Overlays?

Stream overlays are images and animations that appear in your stream over the live video footage. Overlays can add branding to the live stream and generally make the stream look more professional. Overlays are the in-stream graphics that reflect brand aesthetics, help to connect with the target audience, and establish a professional outlook for your live stream. Stream overlays use various graphics to engage the audience by providing visual information about the live stream. Stream overlay includes:

  1. Logos
  2. Banners
  3. Tickers
  4. Guests’ names

🎯 Why do Stream Overlays Matter?

Stream overlays can take your broadcast to the next level. They are the visual representation of a live event and are particularly useful in conveying the look and feel of your stream. They help the audience understand what the live stream is all about, and most importantly, they tactfully complement your content.

Here are some important factors that should be considered while crafting stream overlays:

  • In the matter of stream overlay components, less is usually more
  • Every element of overlay should define stream purpose
  • Keep it simple and creative
  • Design something original and unique
  • Overlay graphics should depict the brand identity

🔀 Customize Your Stream with OneStream Studio Overlays

OneStream  Studio provides amazing features to add professional overlays to your live streams. It helps you to differentiate from other streamers and boosts your viewer engagement. Overlays, logos, tickers, and banners create a unique image that helps you represent your dedication to your stream’s branding.

Overlays play a vital role in making your live stream attractive and impressive. OneStream Studio allows you to add logos, banners, tickers, and display names to your live streams.

✅ Add a logo to describe your brand uniquely

The logo is the most crucial of the brand strategy. People reckon with the brands via brand logos. The moment you see a golden arched M, you know it’s Mcdonald’s.

  • Max size: 5 MB
  • Allowed file: PNG only
  • The logo resolution must be less than 1920 x 1080p

✅ Add a banner to grab attention

Add a banner to your stream for a lasting impression on your audience, enhance engagement and catch attention.

✅ Adding a ticker to share important information

Tickers are ideal for displaying important information or reminders. Add bits of information via a crawling horizontal text-based ticker on your live streams.

✅ Add display names to introduce your guests

Displaying the names of your live stream guests will help the audience better engage with you all. You can control the appearance of participants’ names on the layout using OneStream Studio.

Read: How Overlay works on your stream with OneStream Live Studio?

🔖 Make your Own Overlays

You have quite a few tools at your disposal to make your own custom overlays:

⭕ Canva

Canva is one of the most popular graphic tools for creating powerful overlays. You can use the free or paid plan, as per your requirements, and use the in-built templates to create visually appealing overlays.

⭕ Crello

Crello is a renowned alternative to Canva. With thousands of templates, many of which are free, you can create eye-catchy overlays for your live streams. Crello also has free and paid plans, so you can opt-in for whichever suits you best.

⭕ Stencil

Stencil has over 5 million stock photos to offer, over 1000 templates, and many other presets. The browser-based app also has free and paid plans.

⭕ Snappa

Snappa is known for its ease of use and is rapidly gaining popularity as a powerful alternative to Canva. It is commonly used to make social media posts, ads, and of course, overlays.

🎇 Wrapping Up

OneStream Studio is a perfect solution to add creativity and professionalism to your live streams with overlays. You can create impactful and impressive live streams with amazing overlay graphics to establish a strong brand positioning. With OneStream Studio, you can apply built-in or custom overlays to your streams and share them with the world.

Time to test your creativity. Use OneStream Studio visuals for the best streaming experience.

OneStream Image Gallery

OneStream Live is a cloud-based live streaming solution to create, schedule, and multistream professional-looking live streams across 45+ social media platforms and the web simultaneously. For content-related queries and feedback, write to us at [email protected]. You’re also welcome to Write for Us!

Farwa Sagheer
Farwa Sagheer
Farwa is an enthusiastic CSR at OneStream, with an observant outlook on the global tech industry trends. Focused on improving customer experiences, she writes to assist techies in growth and success.

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