Reading Your Insights: Stream Numbers and Channel Numbers

Where to Find Insights

Insights in the sidebar shows every stream and connected channel together. Pick a channel or a date range at the top.
Each stream also has its own Insights panel with its live audience, viewer history, sessions and delivery quality. See Session Labels and Delivery Quality.

Stream Numbers and Channel Numbers

The numbers on Insights come from two places, and they count different things.

Stream numbers count only what your playout.video streams did:

Time live: how long your streams were on air.
Peak viewers: the most people watching one stream at once, across its destinations.
Peak viewers by platform, Best hours, Top content and Streams.

Channel numbers come from YouTube Analytics and cover your whole YouTube channel:

Watch time: every video on the channel, including uploads and Shorts, not only your lives.
Net subscribers: subscribers gained minus lost, from anything on the channel. For Twitch it shows followers gained.
Audience growth and How viewers find you.

So a channel can gain thousands of subscribers in a week while its stream peaks at a few viewers. The subscribers came from somewhere else on the channel, often uploads that YouTube showed to people through ads or recommendations. How viewers find you shows where the views came from.

Session Labels

On a stream's Insights panel, Sessions lists each run of each destination, newest first. The label says how it ended:

Live: the destination is on air now.
Reconnected: the connection to the platform dropped and came back on the same live within about 10 seconds. Viewers may have seen a short buffer.
Interrupted: the connection dropped and did not come back on the same live. We can only see a reconnect on YouTube and Twitch, so a quick reconnect on another platform shows as Interrupted too. A normal stop during one of our updates can also show this way.
Restarted: our servers restarted the connection, usually during an update, and it carried on by itself.
Next part: a new YouTube live started so YouTube keeps the recording of this one. See Keep Every YouTube Live on a 24/7 Stream.
Auto-stopped: the Free plan's 2-hour session limit stopped it. See Session Length Limits.
Ended: the stream or the destination stopped: you, the calendar or the AI assistant stopped it.

Delivery Quality

Under Delivery quality, for the 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days you picked:

Uptime: the total time your destinations were live, added up. Two destinations live for an hour show 2h.
Interruptions: the sessions marked Interrupted under Sessions: drops that did not come back on the same live. Quick reconnects, our restarts, planned stops and new YouTube lives are not counted. The chart shows them by day.
Avg bitrate: how much video per second we sent to YouTube and Twitch, averaged over the time live. Other platforms are not measured.

Why YouTube Numbers Are Two Days Behind

YouTube Analytics reports each day about two days later. The latest days of watch time and subscribers stay empty or low until YouTube fills them in. Stream numbers are up to date within minutes.

Connecting YouTube Analytics

Channel numbers need permission to read YouTube Analytics. If Insights asks you to connect it, follow the link on the page and allow access. Your last 90 days show up within about 10 minutes.

Without it, the Watch time and Net subscribers tiles say what is missing, and the stream numbers still work.

How Far Back Insights Goes

Choose 7, 28 or 90 days, or a custom range. Detailed stream data is kept for 90 days.