Ashray Urs has a rule: when any platform signals interest in livestreaming, he reaches out that day. 

As Head of Streamlabs at Logitech, his latest move is a native integration with Patreon, launched in May 2026, that turns the subscription platform into a one-click livestreaming destination. His strategic target is the creator who has never gone live.

Streamlabs, owned by Logitech, builds livestreaming software used by creators across Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, and several other platforms. Its product suite spans overlays, alerts, multistreaming, and OBS plugins, designed to lower the technical threshold for broadcasting live. Ashray joined the company in 2019 as a senior product manager and became Head of Streamlabs in 2024, prior to which he spent seven years in strategy and marketing roles at Anheuser-Busch InBev.

“There’s so much you have to manage [with livestreaming]. A decade ago, every single livestreamer was deeply technical,” Ashray says. “We want to make it as easy as uploading a photo or a video.”

Livestreaming Posts Its Strongest Creator Activity in Years

The market Streamlabs serves is growing from the supply side. According to a recent report by Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet, total hours streamed across all platforms increased 6.24% year-over-year in Q1 2026, with total hours watched rising to 21.49 billion, up 2.87% from Q1 2025. Kick posted 65.35% year-over-year growth in hours watched. Twitch, while down 13.68% year-over-year, posted a 3.90% quarter-over-quarter rebound.

Ashray attributes part of the upward pressure to an unlikely source: AI-generated content.

“A lot of the AI and a lot of synthetic content, it feels like that’s forged a place for live where there’s something very authentic and very real about something that’s just happening as it’s happening,” he says. 

The argument is that live’s defining quality, real-time interaction between creator and chat, becomes increasingly differentiated in a feed saturated with produced content.

Streamlabs Eliminates the Technical Barrier to Streaming on Patreon

Patreon began rolling out native livestreaming capabilities for select creators in April 2025, before expanding access more broadly that summer. For years, Streamlabs’ connection to Patreon was limited to a single function: firing an alert when someone became a new patron during a stream. The new integration makes Patreon a full livestreaming destination inside Streamlabs Desktop and the Plugin for OBS, available to all users with an active Patreon account.

The core change is authentication. Streaming to most platforms historically required creators to manually retrieve a stream URL and key, then paste it into their broadcasting software. Ashray describes that process as both technically intimidating and a security vulnerability.

“Anyone can go live to your account with those keys,” he says. “Just obfuscating all of that and making it an auth-type connection is a really big step in any platform integration. That’s the step we took with Patreon.”

The integration adds Patreon as a Multistream destination, allowing creators to broadcast simultaneously to Patreon and any approved platform, including Twitch, YouTube, or TikTok. Streamlabs Dual Output lets creators stream horizontal and vertical formats at the same time, optimizing for different platform orientations. 

Patreon-specific event alerts, such as new patron notifications mid-stream, are supported. A mobile integration is in development.

Why Patreon Subscribers Are a Smarter First Audience Than the Algorithm

The Patreon integration is not primarily aimed at creators already active on both platforms. It targets a specific archetype: the long-form YouTube or podcast creator who has built a Patreon subscriber base but has never broadcast live.

Ashray’s argument is that Patreon subscribers are qualitatively different from algorithm-delivered viewers. They are financially invested in a creator’s success.

“These are some of your most hardcore fans,” he says. “They’re literally financially contributing to your success and ability to keep making content. That feels like such a safe space to maybe experiment with livestreaming.”

He points to MrBeast, who recently crossed 500 million subscribers on YouTube, as evidence that established VOD creators are folding live formats into major content moments. According to Ashray, MrBeast broadcast live when he hit that milestone, allowing fans to participate in real time.

Early adoption of the Patreon integration exceeded expectations. Ashray says he anticipated needing to educate users on how the two platforms now work together. Instead, he found major pent-up demand.

“I guess I didn’t anticipate there was so much pent-up demand,” he says. “People were jumping in right away, and it just improved their workflow significantly.”

Twitch Rounds a Corner While IRL Streaming Reshapes the Format

Ashray cites Twitch’s quarter-over-quarter rebound as the most notable finding from the Q1 2026 data, particularly after sustained year-over-year declines. He sees the platform moving toward a more durable growth model.

A notable factor, in Ashray’s view, is Twitch’s renewed investment in game studio partnerships. At TwitchCon Rotterdam in 2026, Minecraft served as a headline sponsor and was activated throughout the event. Ashray describes it as effectively the first Minecon in a decade, arguing that deep integration with major game releases offers a more reliable growth path than creator exclusivity arrangements.

“It feels like Twitch has this opportunity to round a corner,” he says. “Partnering closely with a game studio like that is a really good path.”

The other format reshaping livestreaming is IRL content: streams produced in physical-world environments rather than from a gaming setup. At TwitchCon, Ashray notes, conversations with creators were dominated by questions about how to move from gaming-only formats into hybrid streams. Twitch responded by introducing a visible lanyard opt-out system at the event, letting attendees signal they did not want to appear on active streams.

“The next generation of top streamers, it feels like this hybrid aspect of streaming, bridging gaming and IRL and jumping between both, is going to play an important role,” Ashray says.

When Patreon Revenue Materializes and When It Doesn’t

Not every creator will find Patreon a meaningful income stream, according to Ashray. He draws a consistent line: Patreon works when a creator has built an audience that wants deeper access, exclusive content, or a direct stake in a creative project. It is harder to sustain for more anonymous streaming formats centered on reaction content or low-engagement chat dynamics.

“Patreon really thrives where community is big,” Ashray says. “If you’ve built a community that wants to engage with you beyond the livestream, wants more content, wants to look behind the scenes, that’s when Patreon can really hit a sweet spot.”

Across platforms, sponsorships remain the dominant revenue driver for livestreamers. Both Patreon and ad revenue require a sustained, recurring audience before generating meaningful returns, and that audience takes time to build. His more direct caution: the larger problem among early-stage streamers is not the wrong monetization mix, it is abandonment. Most people who start livestreaming stop within three months, according to Ashray.

“The first thing is just the consistency,” he says. “Having the conviction that I really believe in this and I’m going to stick to it. Those are the most important things.”

‘GTA VI’ and the Hybrid Streaming Moment Ahead

Streamlabs has IRL-focused product improvements planned for release in the coming weeks. Longer term, he expects the launch of “Grand Theft Auto VI” to bring a new cohort of creators into livestreaming, including lapsed gamers reactivated by the title.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of people wanting to livestream [“GTA VI”],” Ashray says. “A lot of the things that we’re working on, including the upcoming IRL streaming work, are going to make it much easier for people to jump between different kinds of content when they’re livestreaming.”

For Streamlabs, the Patreon integration and the planned IRL improvements follow the same logic: the next wave of livestreamers won’t come from gaming culture alone, and the tools need to meet them where they already are. Ashray’s bet is that Patreon’s subscriber base, built on years of membership-driven content, represents a more credentialed on-ramp to live than any open platform can offer.

“Live is playing a bigger and bigger role in society,” he says. “Opening up livestreaming to more creators broadly is just good for the space overall.”