While I was working on the Elgato StreamDeck review, I thought I should also take some time to give an overview of TipeeeStream as a whole. Elgato seemed very deliberate with their close integrations and while OBS, Twitch, and Twitter all seemed pretty obvious to me, TipeeeStream was something of an oddity in that group. I try to at least know about streaming services but TipeeeStream is something I hadn’t heard of before this.

The first notable thing with TipeeeStream is that it’s compatible with a variety of streaming services. There’s integration with Twitch, YouTube, Mixer, Smashcast, and Dailymotion. The things you can do with these services are relatively limited as a whole but if you’re into fancy stream alerts, having a system to use them across multiple services is nice.

Dashboard

Once you log in, the first thing you’ll see is the TipeeeStream dashboard. The TipeeeStream dashboard includes a feed of various events that you might want in front of you like tips, follows, and subscriptions as well as platform-specific things like Cheers or Super Chat. Because of how robust TipeeeStream can be for you, this dashboard is really nice. If you have your own system already, TipeeeStream might seem needlessly complicated but there’s a lot of functionality available if you want it.

Beyond the dashboard, there are a lot of different widgets available from TipeeeStream. Generally speaking, each of the alerts is highly configurable but for my process, in particular, I found it hard to make sizes very specific. I make my alerts in Photoshop so things work at very specific sizes. Something as simple as “font size for alerts” isn’t an option. TipeeeStream scales fonts in some sort of relative sense but if you make your alerts at size 24 font exactly, for example, that look is hard to achieve consistently in the TipeeeStream editor. It also looks like you can configure some CSS for the widgets but it’s not as robust as Muxy where you have full HTML/CSS control. Also, there doesn’t appear to be any documentation for the widgets so if the elements aren’t present in a blank template, I don’t know how you’d customize anything. I’m not the most HTML/CSS literate person so maybe there is a way to customize these properties or documentation does exist somewhere but it’s not easy to get to regardless.

Alerts box

TipeeeStream’s implementation of an Alert Box is pretty solid. All the basics in terms of font options are here along with basic animation and image/text placement. There’s also a “text shadow” option which isn’t mind blowing but it’s nice to see. The more involved alerts like the tips and cheers have the option to escalate the alert as you see fit with higher amounts, subscriptions have options for resubs and the $9.99 and $24.99 tiers, and follower alerts have random options available. You can toggle on and off each type of alert as well as have multiple alert box instances that are all configurable so if you want a sub alert box to have it’s own theming and placement along with an everything else or even just two alert boxes with the same stuff but different visual theming, you can do all that here.

All of the widgets have custom themes available that go a bit beyond just dropping in a gif and using the alert basically stock. For the more ambitious among you, the pre-made themes show how different some of the alerts can be. Many of them are a bit cheesy to me but the “Sliding Banner” is very reminiscent of Nerd or Die’s Overwatch alert so if you want a high-quality base design, TipeeeStream has you covered.

Goals

Having follower or sub goals is nothing new but a widget that allows that to be more visual is nice. TipeeeStream’s goal widget allows you to track followers, subs, or tips but not Cheers or other platform specific events. The bar can be set to a standard bar, a half or full circle bar, or just plain text if you prefer. The goal widget also has time-based goals if you need that along with a success state for the widget.

Top & Last

The alternative to your traditional, more graphical event list is just a text read out of your recent follows, subs, or tips. Some people might use text files and render it on a local level, which TipeeeStream still has, but a widget you can configure and place on your stream directly is useful in its own way. If there’s a complaint I have for this widget, it’s that you can’t mix and match things as you can with the alert box. You can’t have the widget track recent followers, subs, and tips. Only one at a time. Most people will probably look over this widget entirely but it could have its own use in the TipeeeStream Scene Creator so stick around for that.

Chat Box

TipeeeStream’s implementation of their chat box seems initially very limited. I may be spoiled by the pre-set options available from Streamlabs but you only get a “plain” chat widget, for lack of a better description. This chat widget only supports Twitch, Hitbox, and “Beam” (now Mixer) and doesn’t seem to integrate all together at once. The features are pretty basic, as far as I’m concerned. You can toggle how long messages stay on screen, show and hide toggles for BTTV emotes, bot messages, and various chat badges. There’s a user blacklist you can set if you need it, although you will have to enter usernames in manually, and you can set where the messages visually come from and how they align. You can have the most recent chat message be magnified slightly which I like but the animation for moving out of that more recent slot is non-existent and jarring as a result. Also, this is probably some kind of weird bug but it looks like the “text shadow” for the chat box doesn’t apply to the usernames in chat. This is probably a very simple bug on their end but it’s something you’ll see for every username that comes up in chat.

Counters & Totals

Counters and totals are what it sounds like: A widget with the total amount of followers, subs, donations, and bits. Much like with the Top & Last widget, you could pull this information with text files that pull your stream data but a widget version could be handy.

Live Events

The live events widget shows all the recent events in your stream. You can set what kind of event is displayed for your live events as well as the formatting and exact wording for any event type along with custom icons. You can toggle on top tip tracking within this widget to stick the top tipper on the widget, and then there are basic visual toggles like where the events align, the option to make the widget vertically or horizontally oriented, how far the events are from each other, if the widget is more condensed horizontally depending on the text size, and how prominent the most recent element is.

This is a fantastic example of TipeeeStream offering a robust tool with more options than its contemporaries. If I could ask for anything else, I guess I’d want more granular background color options for event types to go along with the custom icons as well as being able to set minimums for all the different alerts if you needed to. Hosting would be a good start but drawing the line at not showing 1 bit notifications might be reasonable. You also can only set the top tip with actual money tips only, not with bits or super chat. I would like to make it so events don’t stay on screen forever, maybe a certain amount of time like the chat widget.

Desktop Tools and Streamer Experience

The last bit is some extra stuff TipeeeStream includes. The TipeeeStream Desktop Tool is TipeeeStream’s way to write all your info to text files in case you want to pull that data into OBS or XSplit yourself. The Desktop Tool uses Java and does all the normal stuff you expect. There are files for your last followers, subs, and tips as well as counters. The Desktop Tool can also power your in-chat notifications if you’d like. This looks exactly like other data-to-text apps but since TipeeeStream filters in a few different streaming services, having all that data to pull from can be nice.

The Streamer Experience includes some tools that would each probably be their own nice app to use so it’s funny to see them kind of hidden in a “Streamer Experience” tab. There’s a Straw Poll visualizer, a Hype Train widget that can pull in followers, subs, and tips into one on-screen element, timers for various different things, and info sliders which they probably intend for you to use as a way to show your social media accounts on stream and cycle between them.

SceneCreator

All of these tools on their own are fine but the most appealing part about all of them is that you can integrate everything into overlays you build on TipeeeStream so you have one single browser source to pull in instead of several for all the widgets you use. To add any other branding elements to each scene like you might want, you can add in static images, text, sound effects, and even iframe embeds.

Where I think this whole thing is cool is that you can have a couple different ways to toggle scene elements. You can have different elements be visible at all times, only when alerts happen, or toggle things with the Elgato StreamDeck. First, toggling the elements with the StreamDeck is useful in its own way. You can toggle sources directly in OBS with the StreamDeck but it doesn’t have smooth animations if you do. The main thing that really catches my eye is actually the on-event toggle for stream elements. You can literally change your whole overlay when you get a sub or follower. It’s a fantastic option when you have control over the entire overlay and it’s a feature that I’m surprised I don’t see more of already.

The SceneCreator would probably be good enough for many people to use as is and work in their stream but I find myself wanting just a little bit more. The very nit-picky problem I have is that I find exact alignments a bit annoying to do in the editor. I make overlays and stream elements to be a very specific size and fit in a specific way which is hard to do in the SceneCreator. Even something like snapping two elements together so they’re really right next to each other manages to feel floaty.

Thoughts

This is the unfortunate part where despite spending a lot of time and words to describe all the widgets in TipeeeStream, I wouldn’t really recommend using it and I find it’s integration with StreamDeck a bit odd. Not to say there’s some kind of requirements out there to have this initial integration with Elgato but TipeeeStream as a service seems to lack polish in my opinion. The default look for many of the widgets doesn’t do much for me and the SceneCreator itself doesn’t have a professional feel to it. I’m not saying I can only have something that looks like Photoshop otherwise I’ll turn my nose up at it but something can be said for setting expectations. There’s probably someone more qualified than me to go into the actual payment processing and how TipeeeStream ranks with that and there are lots of possibilities with all the tools since you can edit the CSS for everything but I find myself wanting more than that from TipeeeStream.

I would say one of the appeals of TipeeeStream is it’s cross-platform integration with Twitch, YouTube, Mixer, and Smashcast even though I find it a little bit disappointing when I see there are little things not fully integrated. It seems they already get the shaft in some regard with tools, so little things like mentioning “Mixer” at the login but “Beam” everywhere else or not adhering to the Subscriber and Sponsor terminology that YouTube uses are things that stand out to me. These are just words to some but there’s a combination of attention to detail and respect for other platforms that is certainly missing here and definitely plays into my expectations.

As I said at the start of this conclusion, I may have spent too many words and too much time talking about a glorified overlay system but I think it’s important to take these tools seriously. The difference in this being yet another streaming tool and The definitive overlay tool is just a handful of tweaks for me apparently and if TipeeeStream checked more boxes, I’d probably be telling everyone to use it right now. Regardless of the circumstances of these “problems”, I do hope that TipeeeStream continues to grow and develop and that potentially overly critical pieces like this one don’t discourage the team behind TipeeeStream and others from making tools like this. Especially with something like the SceneCreator, anything that lets a streamer put something together quickly and easily will just enable them to be more funny and creative on cast which is the goal.

If you want to see some of the options you have with all the TipeeeStream widgets, they have a limited demo on their site and you can see more info on their FAQ.