Steamworks Documentation
Broadcast Viewership Statistics
After running a live stream on Steam, you may want to collect your viewership stats to determine the reach of your streaming efforts. By logging in as the account used for streaming, you can visit the broadcast history page to see this data. Steam will capture and present to you the maximum concurrent viewers, your total viewers, average watch time, and total watch time by all viewers.

Concepts

On the broadcast history page, you will see a table with two type of rows: Broadcast Sessions and Upload Sessions.

  • Broadcast Session - This is created by Steam when you first start a live stream and will continue to exist for at least 5 minutes after you stop streaming. It tracks all users logged in AND not logged in that are either currently watching the stream or have watched the stream. Consider the broadcast session as a container for all of your upload sessions that will uniquely aggregate all viewership stats.
  • Upload Session - This is created every time you establish an upload stream with Steam and tracks the continuous video and audio sent to Steam. If your network connection is interrupted then the upload session will automatically close. Most modern streaming software will automatically establish a new connection to continue streaming. This new connection would create a new upload session and it will automatically associate itself with an existing broadcast session (if one exists).

History Table

The following image is an example of the Broadcast History Table. The first row in this example is the Broadcast session and it captures the viewership for your live streams. There are also three additional rows, each of them are different upload sequential upload sessions. Having more than one upload session means that the underlying streams were interrupted and then re-established prior to five minutes elapsing.

BroadcastHistory

Detail Pages

By clicking the Details found at the end of these rows, it will expand the data presented to you. The broadcast session will, for example, show you your overall viewership data for the entire event across all of the sequential upload sessions. This is capturing all unique viewers across all upload sessions without an interruption longer than 5 minutes.

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The upload session will expand to show specifics for one continuous upload stream to Steam. This includes the video resolution, when the particular stream started and stopped (duration), and possible error conditions. This will also show a graph for concurrent viewers for the duration of the upload session.

Steam will automatically enable transcoding when an upload session has more than 10 concurrent viewers. Transcoding is the process of taking the same video and making a smaller version of the video. For example, if your input video stream was 1080p, transcoding will likely create 720p, 480p and 360p resolution video streams. The smaller video size will improve the overall experience for users with slower network connection.

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Frequently Asked Questions

  • What if my game capsule is missing? - If you do not see your game capsule in the history page, this means that 'AppID' was not setup on the broadcast upload page. This will prevent the live stream from appearing on the store page and prevent appropriate categorization of the stream on Steam Community site.
  • How far back does the history go? - We only show your broadcast data from the last 30 days.
  • If a single user watches two separate upload sessions, does it count as two viewers? - While we present concurrent viewers over time with the upload sessions, the actual tabulating of unique viewers is done at the broadcast session level. Therefore, if the same viewer watches two different upload sessions for the same broadcast session, they would only be counted as a single unique viewer.