Frequently Asked Questions

General Questions

What’s Glimesh?

Glimesh is a next-generation streaming platform built by the community, for the community. We know establishing a following is hard and the hours are long. Our platform focuses on increasing discoverability for content creators and implementing the latest in streaming technology to level the playing field. We understand the importance of interaction between content creators and their fans and we’re dedicated to innovating new ways to bring communities closer together.

Why make this project?

The core inspiration of this project has been equality. At Glimesh our priority is you. We want to do what is best for the community and allow the community a chance to be involved in every step along the way. Our roadmap is formed by you, the community, based on your feedback and what you ask for. In everything we do, we will ensure the tools to allow streamers and community alike control over how to use these features creating an experience as unique as you!

What makes Glimesh unique?

We are an Open Company dedicated to putting true transparency and openness first. Come see for yourself by joining our Discord!
We also are not locking features behind metrics which means that for example, everyone gets to upload both static and/or animated emotes and get the subscription button straight away. FTL also sets us apart, which means sub-second delay between the streamer and viewer.

When will the beta be released?

Let’s be realistic, there’s a lot to tackle until the beta is ready. We currently are in phase 2 of our alpha roadmap, which focuses on viewership. For updates on our progress, you can check out our monthly board meetings or Glimcaps, which are recaps of the team meetings and happenings from the past month.

How can I help?

Easy! Join us on Building Glimesh and choose in which areas you would like to help out.

Business Questions

How is Glimesh going to compete with other platforms in the long run? What do you believe you can provide in regards to something different or unique that other platforms haven’t done or failed to do?

Well, it depends on what you care about when it comes to a streaming platform. We’re very unique in our care and concern for your data, and respecting your rights as a user. All of our company operations are transparent and open for anyone to learn about, and we are fully open source as well.

From a feature perspective, we’re hyper focused on truly live streams and we are pioneering sub second stream latency for all users in a scalable way. We don’t lock any critical features behind any kind of popularity walls, or microtransactions. We’re also driven to make all streamers discoverable, because your success is our success!

How does Glimesh hope to bring viewers in? What are your marketing plans?

Our goal is to focus on having a live, diverse, and friendly platform where new users feel right at home after visiting your stream. We understand the need to continue to bring our user base back to the site, and make sure they know how they can find new content to watch. By showcasing all of our diverse streaming types directly in the nav bar, users can also immediately visit new types of streams they may be unaware exist.

We also recognize that your growth as a streamer is our growth as a platform and we should do everything possible to make sure you are successful on Glimesh. We also recognize that your growth as a streamer is our growth as a platform and we should do everything possible to make sure you are successful on Glimesh. We want to ensure that we work closely with the community to help build the platform that you want to be a part of, and provide the tools you need to be successful.

Will Glimesh use my content in advertising? If yes, how so?

The Terms of Service that binds your usage of our website gives us permission to use your content for advertising, redistribution, storage, and more. However, we want to form strong bonds with streamers who appreciate us using their content to grow the platform and their stream.

Does everyone have the opportunity to get a sub button? What are the requirements for a sub button?

Yes! We’re offering subscriptions to all users in supported countries. The only requirement to set up your banking details is verifying your identity with our 3rd party payment and tax collection processors. In addition, you are ultimately in control of your own stream so you can also disable your subscription button at will.

We are using Stripe for our subscriptions, which means we can not control which countries are supported. However, they are constantly working on expanding their service to more countries.

Will you support Paypal?

Currently our primary focus is around Direct Debit & ACH (account & routing) via Stripe to support the majority of users.

Will there be a different type of membership for channel subscribers, much like Patreon and YouTube?

Currently, we don’t have different tiers of subscriptions available on the platform. But we will get the communities feedback once we can focus on this.

Will Glimesh be a publicly-traded company?

Way too early to think about this. There is a lot of discussions to be had about this, but the current thought is we’ll probably be more aligned with a cooperative or employee-owned company.

Features Questions

Will streamers have custom emote support for their channels?

Good news, we recently launched custom channel emotes. At the moment they are not global emotes and only available on their dedicated channel. We currently allow you to have two emotes- which can be static and animated. For static, we so far support only SVG files, for animated emotes GIFs. However, we are working on expanding them to PNGs too and make them usable globally as well.

Will channel hosting be available? Will you be able to raid another stream when you are done?

You can setup a roster of channels you’d like to automatically host when you are offline via your hosting dashboard. Hosting channels manually is not currently supported, but will be added in the future! Raiding is a part of phase 2 in our alpha roadmap, which we currently are in. We’re still in the process of researching this feature, and are learning about the differences between the two and ways of simplifying it. We don’t want to devalue hosting/raiding in any way, we want it to be impactful.

Will we have the option to turn off saving VODs and clips?

Yes, absolutely. Once we have the ability to have VODs, clips, or other saved media you will have the ultimate control of it.

Will there be an app for mobile devices and/or consoles?

In March 2022 we launched our mobile app to Android & iOS devices! The main focus of the app at the moment is watching streams and chatting, however in the future you’ll be able to subscribe and support streams directly.

A console app is unfortunately very far off.

How does Glimesh plan to implement new features created by the community?

We want to make sure we have a very clear standard on how feature development works. All large features should start with some sort of spec or document that is well thought out and researched before developing against it.

Will Glimesh have a feature like Mixplay?

We pride ourselves on live engagement with your community and we think real-time features are a requirement for us. The goal is to provide a developer framework for anyone to create custom content like Mixplay.

What alerts will there be for streams?

We do already have integrations with PixelChat, Chameolabs and more, so alerts are available to use. Bigger services like Streamelements and Streamlabs currently do not support us, but the ones that support us, work pretty well. For more services, check out our #community-projects channel in our Discord.

Will you be allowing custom length timeouts?

Probably not in Alpha. At the moment you can timeout users for 5 and 10 minutes.

Will you have a system in place to automatically ban users who are timed out by different moderators?

This is a great opportunity for a 3rd party tool.

Which game database are you using? And what if a game is not in the database?

We are using the RAWG database. If you want to stream a game that is not a part of the database yet, then we give you the option to manually add the game. For that, you simply type in the game’s name and then press enter. It then is added to the Glimesh database of custom games and will stay available.

What is the max bitrate supported?

Glimesh currently has a maximum recommended bitrate of 6000 Kbps. Due to minimal compression with FTL, most streams end up looking extremely crisp even at this lower bitrate limit.

Will you only be able to stream using FTL, or will there be also a way to do RTMP streams?

Currently, you can only stream using clients that are compatible with the FTL streaming protocol, which includes OBS and SLOBS. Low-latency RTMP support is coming in Phase 2 of the Alpha.

Will gift subs be available?

Yes, it is a part of phase 2 on the roadmap.

Will I be able to make custom animated emotes, once custom emotes are a thing?

Yes, custom animated emotes are now available for all channels!

Community Questions

Can you make a community group for a group of streamers with similar interests and goals?

We’re very interested in exploring how we can create communities as a built-in feature of the website. However, it is not currently in the alpha roadmap.

How will view counts be handled? Will you require viewers to have the audio on?

We don’t have anything that rewards you for viewer count (we don’t sort by viewer count, award features, etc), so right now we just show the number of unique browser connections to the player.

How do you plan on dealing with bots on the platform, either in chat or causing inflated numbers?

On Glimesh, we’re not directly tying numbers like viewership or follows into any measure of success, so view botting really doesn’t give any benefits. However we understand the importance of these numbers for you to understand how you are doing, so we’re going to combat unauthorized robots by requiring users to validate their emails and fill out a captcha to do certain tasks on the website.

Will discoverability be a main focus of the platform, and will streamers be able to co-stream with each other, regardless of channel size?

Discoverability is a main focus of our platform. During alpha, it will be extremely easy to find new content to watch. However as we grow this becomes more of a problem, and we want to experiment with a couple of different options for making it easy to find new and smaller streams. From the very beginning, we are working hard on making streaming equitable for all, so you don’t have to compete with unfair advantages.

Will you have a “store” so others can publish/consume content like chatbots, tutorials, or design resources?

We’re building preliminary support for a marketplace where users can facilitate the distribution of various content you can use on your stream or on the platform. We’re still very much in the early planning phases.

Are users that are banned able to read chats or will the chats be inaccessible like on Twitch?

Banning a user from your stream, or a user getting banned from the platform does not prohibit them from consuming your content and chat. Even if we blocked those users from your chat, they would be able to log out or use a VPN to continue to access your content.