Broadcast Your Radio Station On YouTube

Broadcast Your Radio Station On YouTubeFebruary 4th, 2025

When it comes to watching videos on the internet, YouTube by far and away is the dominant platform. YouTube has more than 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the start of 2025. In fact, of all global internet users more than 50 percent access the platform every month.

With such a massive and particularly active user base, it would be foolish for any internet radio station not to consider adding their live broadcasts to YouTube. If you’ve had a similar thought and are after more information, then you’re in the right place!

In this help article, we’ll walk you through all the steps required to broadcast your internet radio live on YouTube. Let’s begin.

Please note: be careful with the content you broadcast live. YouTube can be quite strict when it comes to broadcasting copyright-protected content. To avoid temporary or even permanent bans from YouTube, we would recommend only live streaming copyright-free material.

Prerequisites

Before we begin describing the specific steps you’ll need to livestream through YouTube. There’s a few prerequisites step you should complete before continuing on with this guide.

A verified YouTube channel

This should go without saying, but you will need to create a channel on YouTube before you do anything else. However, what isn’t immediately obvious are the additional steps YouTube requires before you can get started with live streaming. These are:

  • Your channel must have received no live streaming restrictions in the past 90 days, and
  • Your channel must be verified. To do so, YouTube requires you to enter a phone number where a verification message will be sent to. Please bear in mind that the verification process can take up to 24 hours, so plan accordingly.

Download OBS

There are multiple ways to livestream through YouTube. However, the particular method we’ll cover in this guide is live streaming with an encoder. Again, there are a multitude of encoders that are verified to work with YouTube. The encoder we will be using in this help article is OBS.

OBS is a popular open-source streaming software solution. It supports both video and audio capturing, whilst packing loads of features and settings. There is somewhat of a learning curve to it, but if you willingly to invest the time it offers great flexibility for your stations bespoke streaming needs.

It is available to download on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Download VLC

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as various streaming protocols.

We don’t use VLC directly. But it needs to be installed on your computer so OBS can be configured in the manner we need to live broadcast on YouTube.

It is available to download on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Please note: the bit version of OBS and VLC must align. So if you’ve downloaded the 64-bit version of OBS, you must also download the 64-bit version of VLC.

Configuring your radio stream in OBS

With all the prerequisites out of the way, it's time to start setting everything up. The first set of steps you need to accomplish is adding the streaming URL of your internet radio station into OBS.

To implement this, please complete the following steps:

Configuring your radio stream in OBS

  1. Open OBS,
  2. Create a scene by clicking the plus (+) button in the bottom left-hand corner of the application. A window will appear, enter the name of the scene and then click the OK button,
  3. Add a source to the scene by clicking the plus (+) button within the Sources section. A dropdown will appear, select the VLC Video Source option. A window will appear, ensure the Create new option is selected and then click the OK button. A Properties window will appear.
  4. In the Playlist section of the Properties window, click the plus (+) button. A dropdown will appear, select the Add Path/URL option. A Add entry window will appear. In the displayed text input, enter your station’s streaming URL and then click the OK button.

Your streaming URL should now be added to OBS.

We’ve now added audio to your soon to be broadcasted live stream. So we’ve covered what your YouTube listeners will hear, but not what they’ll see. To add visuals to your broadcast, add another source to the scene we made earlier. You can display images, you can share your computer screen and plenty more. It's all up to you!

Please note: On Radio Cult, your streaming URL can be retrieved from the dashboard. The URL is displayed in the Your stream URL panel. You can copy the URL by hovering your mouse over the text and clicking the copy button.

Setting up your stream in YouTube

We now need to head over to YouTube to generate your streaming key. This key allows the output from OBS to be successfully broadcast on YouTube.

To do so, please complete the following steps:

  1. In your web browser of choice, navigate to YouTube,
  2. Ensure your on the YouTube Studio dashboard, click the Create button in the top right-hand corner. A dropdown will appear, select the Go Live option to open the Live Control Room,
  3. Click the Start button in the Right now section of the prompt asking you when do want to go live and then click the Go button in the Streaming software section of the stream type prompt,
  4. Ensure your on the Stream settings tab and then edit your stream details, such as the stream’s title and description.
  5. Click the Copy button next to the Stream key input.

Your streaming key should now be generated and saved to your computer’s clipboard!

Adding streaming key to OBS

Now we need to access OBS again to input the streaming key we generated in the previous section.

To add the streaming key to OBS, please complete the following steps:

Adding streaming key in OBS

  1. Open OBS,
  2. Click on the Settings button within the Controls section. The Settings window will appear,
  3. Click on the Stream option in the left-hand side navigation menu. Click the Service dropdown and select the YouTube - RTMPS option,
  4. In the Destination section, click the Use Stream Key button. In the Stream key input, paste the key we generated in step 5 of the previous section,
  5. Then click the OK button.

Your YouTube streaming key should now be successfully added to OBS!

Please note: during the above set of steps you may be prompted by OBS to sign in to your Google/YouTube account.

Going live

If you’ve reached this far then everything should be ready for you to go live and start broadcasting your station’s audio through YouTube.

Going live

To go live, in OBS simply click the Start Streaming button in the Controls section. Your radio should now be broadcasting live on YouTube!

Sharing live stream

To share the YouTube stream with your listeners, click the Share (arrow) button in the top right-hand corner. The Share live stream window will appear. Copy the URL from the Video link input and you’re good to share your YouTube live stream with whomever you please.

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