Dev blog · 24 June 2026

Why we built Stage Studio

The setup problem nobody talks about

I built Stage Studio because I wanted to livestream my coding sessions and have them look like a keynote, and every existing path to get there cost me either an afternoon of setup or a noticeable chunk of my Mac's performance. So I wrote the tool I wished I had. A native macOS streaming studio that leans hard on Apple silicon, launches instantly, and gets out of the way while I work.

This is the origin story, what bugged me, the bet I made, and where it landed.

Why OBS wasn't it (for me)

OBS is genuinely great software, and I'm not here to dunk on it. It's powerful, it's free, and a huge community keeps it alive. But power has a cost, and for my use case, solo coding streams, that cost showed up as fiddliness.

Every stream meant wiring up sources, sizing capture windows, building scene layouts by hand, and tuning encoder settings I half-understood. Get one thing wrong and you're staring at a black rectangle two minutes before going live. It's a control surface for a TV studio, and I'm one person trying to ship code on camera.

The other branch of the tooling tree is the wave of Electron-based streaming and "creator" apps. Many of them look friendlier, and then you watch a browser engine sit on your CPU and RAM the whole time you're trying to run a build. When the thing capturing your screen is competing with the thing you're demoing, your demo loses.

So the gap I kept bumping into. I wanted a clean, directed, keynote-grade look without running a production crew or a second machine, and without paying for it in frames.

The bet. Go truly native

The whole bet behind Stage Studio is that a real native Mac app, built to use what Apple silicon already gives you, can be both better-looking and dramatically lighter than the alternatives.

So that's what it is, Swift and SwiftUI, top to bottom. It captures your screen with ScreenCaptureKit and your webcam with AVFoundation, composites the scenes on the GPU with Core Image and Metal, encodes H.264 on the media engine with VideoToolbox, and streams secure RTMPS out through bundled ffmpeg. No browser engine in the middle. No cross-platform abstraction tax.

Here's what "native" actually buys you, concretely. On my own machine, an M4 Pro, 12-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 48 GB, streaming 1440p30 live uses less than one of those 12 cores. That's roughly 7% total CPU, about 0.6 GB of RAM, and essentially 0% CPU spent on encoding, because the encode runs on the dedicated media engine, not the CPU.

Read that number again, because it's the whole point. The other eleven-and-a-bit cores are free. They're available for the compiler, the dev server, the simulator, the actual work you're streaming. The streaming software isn't the bottleneck in your demo anymore.

Native buys you the obvious things too. The app launches instantly instead of booting a runtime. It stays quiet, no fans spinning up just because you hit "go live." And because it speaks the platform's own frameworks, the whole pipeline from screen to encoder is the short path, not a chain of adapters.

The design goal. One window that looks directed

The performance bet was half of it. The other half was making streams look good without making me do production work.

I didn't want a node graph or a stack of source layers. I wanted one window, and a small set of scenes that already look composed, like someone directed them. So Stage Studio ships with five. Full, Split, Standby with a starting-soon countdown, Camera, and Outro. You switch between them live with cross-fade transitions, and you can trigger them with global hotkeys, Control-Option-1 through 5, from inside your editor, without alt-tabbing back to the studio.

On top of that there are three "Looks", Stage (warm, AI-generated keynote backgrounds), Minimal (a starfield), and Editorial, so the frame has a point of view instead of a gray void. Webcam background blur runs on-device with Vision, so there's no green screen to hang. There's a mic level meter so you know you're actually being heard, an optional lower-third, and optional AI background music via Google Lyria if you want it.

The throughline. The defaults should look like a keynote on the first try, and the controls you reach for mid-stream should be one keypress away.

A few things I'm quietly proud of

Two features came straight out of streaming for real and wishing they existed.

The first is multistreaming. Stage Studio can go live to YouTube and LinkedIn, and Twitch, X, or any RTMPS endpoint, at the same time. The nice part is how. It's one hardware encode, fanned out to every destination through ffmpeg's tee muxer. So adding a second or third platform costs you upload bandwidth, not extra CPU. You're not encoding the stream three times.

The second is ISO recording. While you stream, Stage Studio can save a clean screen capture and a clean webcam recording as separate .mov files. So the messy live cut goes out to your audience, and you still walk away with pristine source footage to edit a polished version later.

I wanted to hit one button, look like a keynote, and trust my Mac to handle the rest, so I could spend my attention on the code, not the broadcast.

The honest part. Pricing

This is an indie product, so let me be straight about the model. Stage Studio is free, fully functional, with a small "made and streamed with stagestudio.tv" watermark in the corner. If the watermark bugs you, a one-time $49 Pro purchase removes it, and it works on up to 5 Macs you own. No subscription, no tiers, no per-stream fees. You buy it once or you use it free.

It runs on macOS 14 Sonoma and later, on both Apple silicon and Intel, though the efficiency story is really an Apple silicon story.

FAQ

Is Stage Studio trying to replace OBS entirely?

Not for everyone. OBS has enormous depth and plugin support, and if you need a complex multi-source production setup, it's still the tool. Stage Studio is for people who want a clean, keynote-grade stream, especially coding and demo streams, without building it by hand. It trades configurability for a fast, native, looks-good-by-default experience.

Why does the low CPU usage matter so much?

Because if you're streaming a demo, your streaming software is competing with whatever you're demoing. At roughly 7% CPU for 1440p30, with the encode on the media engine, not the CPU, Stage Studio leaves nearly all of your machine free to run the actual thing on screen. Your build, your server, your tests stay fast.

Can I really stream to multiple platforms without tanking performance?

Yes. Stage Studio encodes once in hardware and fans that single stream out to every destination via ffmpeg's tee muxer. So going live to YouTube and LinkedIn at once costs you upload bandwidth, not additional CPU or extra encode passes.

What do I lose by using the free version?

Just a small "made and streamed with stagestudio.tv" watermark. Every feature, scenes, Looks, multistreaming, ISO recording, blur, works in the free version. The one-time $49 Pro purchase only removes the watermark, on up to 5 Macs you own.

If you stream from a Mac, coding sessions, demos, talks, anything, I'd love for you to try it and tell me where it falls short. Download it and go live at stagestudio.tv.