Guide to Clipping and Community Alternatives to Medal.tv

Creating clips of gameplay and live streams is an important service for content creators. Live streams can range from an hour to entire days, so creators need to capture the most important moments from their streams so they can share them with their community. In parallel, people love watching gaming clips and are always looking for more ways to see the best moments. It’s critical for creators to find the right communities with which they share their content. In this blog we’ll explore the clip editing tool and community, Medal.tv as well as popular alternatives.

Tools for Editing Gaming Clips

Whether it’s your best gaming highlights or funniest moments from a community stream, it’s important to use the right tools to edit and share your content. Creators can also make edits, montages, and other exciting forms of content using editing tools. One stream can become hundreds of different opportunities to make new pieces of content that you can share with your community.

Platforms to Reach Gaming Communities

Creators also need to have a place to share their short form content. Getting views, likes, shares, and interaction with your content is a key part of being a content creator. There are numerous platforms that also offer communities where creators can grow and engage with.

What is Medal.tv?

Medal (aka medal.tv) is a popular service that creators use to edit and share their gaming content. Founded in 2018, the platform offers ways for creators to edit their best clips. Users can also share their clips on Medal’s website and app. Medal combines easy to use editing software with a community of gaming fans.

Medal has three main features: clipping, editing, and sharing. Medal’s editing capabilities fall somewhere between a basic template approach and a pro-level editing suite like Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple’s Final Cut Pro.

Clipping on Medal

• Users can install Medal and it will run in the background while you’re playing games. Hit F8 or a hotkey of your choice and Medal will clip that moment for you. Content is then stored in the cloud so you can access it from anywhere, whether web or mobile. With Medal you can clip anywhere from 15 seconds to 10 minutes of gameplay in up to 144 FPS + 4kUHD, capture game audio only and include your camera overlay.

Editing Clips on Medal

• Medal has a game clip editor for both PC and mobile. It offers effects, transitions and DMCA-free music for creators to use as they edit their clips. Users can add text, GIFs, stickers, meme templates, and external images and videos to clips. These features are likely enough for most creators who don’t want to step up to the pro video editing tier.

Sharing Clips on Medal

• You can also use Medal to share your gaming clips and edits. Medal has easy to use social integrations to share with other social networks like Instagram and TikTok. You can also share clips directly to Medal’s own community of gaming creators and fans. Medal’s content platform enables fans to view, comment, like, and engage with gaming content as well. While Medal’s community lacks the size of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, it is a passionate group of gaming-focused users who may be interested in your content.

Monetization on Medal

• Medal does not offer any monetization built into their platform at the moment. They previously had a partner program like YouTube and Twitch, but this does not seem to be active anymore.

Alternate Gaming Clip Platforms to Medal

While Medal offers strong editing features for gaming creators as well as a growing community, what are other platforms that offer services similar to Medal? We’ve put together a list of Medal alternatives. It’s recommended as a content creator to try different platforms and use whichever ones work best for you.  

Why Post on Different Gaming Content Platforms?

Posting content across platforms is considered best practice as it allows creators to play to their strengths. Some of your content may be more appropriate for TikTok over YouTube for example. Additionally, establishing a presence on different platforms helps you to reach different communities. Users of one community may not be on another. Finally, using several different platforms helps to reduce a creator’s dependence on a particular platform for growth or engagement. If one of your main platforms disappeared today, would you still have a strong community? Diversifying platforms used to edit and share content is a fundamental step as a content creator.

Each platform has its benefits and downsides when it comes to content editing, community, and monetization features.

FreshCut

FreshCut is a popular short form gaming content platform and community that offers both a website and app. FreshCut is built for gaming creators and fans - compared to other platforms which serve a much wider audience. Anyone can upload their content to FreshCut and also monetize via Diamond tips, the in-app virtual currency. Creators keep 90% of all tips - a market leading rate. FreshCut also offers a Partner Program, where partners can access the $1M Creator Fund, Partner rewards and other benefits.

Currently, FreshCut does not have any native video editing tools, but you can upload your Twitch Clips by entering the URL in Creator Studio. FreshCut will convert it so you can easily upload that content. Additional editing tools and features are coming soon.

FreshCut has an active community of gaming fans and partners in Discord and in its app. The platform also offers various events, quests, contents, and challenges that creators can enter like FreshCut Challenges (enter your best clips for different games to win money and gaming rewards) and FreshCut Rising Star (where creators compete to win a share of $10,000). FreshCut also offers features like a personalized “For You” feed as well as curated playlists that highlight gaming content and creators. In-app quests are a way users can also acquire Diamonds - which they can use to tip creators or spend for merch.

Powder

Powder is a gaming focused clipping platform. Creators download Powder and run it in the background while streaming and playing games. Powder offers AI tools that will automatically clip your best moments - or you can manually clip them as well. A new feature from Powder is quests in which you can earn rewards like badges and gift cards for getting victories, kills, and other highlights in games.The Powder app can be downloaded for PC and iOS

Powder offers a Discord server with other creators but does not have a community built into its app like a traditional social network. At the moment, Powder doesn’t have any direct monetization features, but it does have quests where you can get rewards.

TikTok

Everyone knows TikTok. The most popular social media platform in the world, focused on short form content. TikTok is legendary for its algorithm and “For You Page” which can make people go viral and get hundreds of millions of views, likes, and shares in days. TikTok has a strong and massive community of viewers creators can tap in to.

On the other hand, there is little to no support for gaming specifically as creators of all kinds post on TikTok. Your gaming content can be found next to cooking clips and sports bloopers.

Only the biggest creators are able to make ad revenue and monetize. Smaller creators can earn from virtual currencies and gifts, but the TikTok revenue share remains significant. TikTok is notorious for delivering massive amounts of views but only actually resulting in a few dollars. Creators can monetize via virtual goods on the platform, be that gifts (like Roses) or TikTok Diamonds (their virtual currency used to purchase gifts).

TikTok does not have robust native editing tools - people often edit outside of TikTok and bring it in to the platform to upload.

Instagram Reels

Instagram Reels is Instagram’s TikTok competitor, focused on video and viral content. If you’re already familiar with Instagram, it’s super easy to post Reels too. Like TikTok, it doesn’t have a specific gaming focus, instead videos are fed to the community based on what they like and interact with. Getting on the Instagram Discover page is equivalent of TikTok’s “For You” page - can bring virality, views, and engagement. Instagram offers basic editing tools - best to edit and bring into the app. Often, users will post the same content from TikTok to their Reels.

Reels benefits from having Instagram’s massive built-in community of billions of users. But this also means gaming specific features and activations are limited. There are few monetization features for all but the largest creators, and there are no tipping features yet on Instagram.

Twitch Clips

To complement its live streaming platform, Twitch also has a “Clips” product that enables creators and fans to clip parts of streams and share it with the community. You need to be a creator on Twitch to leverage this feature. It’s a basic clip functionality that is meant to offer another on-platform tool to capture the best moments from your stream. Twitch Clips offers no editing features beyond selecting a segment of the stream to clip so you can’t add overlays or other types of edits.

When it comes to community, Twitch has a large and robust community of streamers and fans of gaming content. Having started as a platform focused on gaming, Twitch remains true to its roots today. One challenge with Twitch is that they take a significant amount of creator and partner revenue. There are no tools specifically for Twitch Clips and short form content. Instead it’s all focused around the live stream experience with subscriptions and tips via Twitch Bits. Twitch takes 50% of all subs as well as 30% of all Bits at purchase. Short form content is not a priority on Twitch, live streaming is, so all the features will always be built with that in mind. Twitch Clips are hard to find on a creator’s profile and take secondary important to live streams and full stream recordings.

YouTube Shorts

All major video and content platforms are diving into short form content and YouTube is no exception. YouTube Shorts, their short form content offering, is rapidly rising in popularity and competing with TikTok and Reels as a place to share your best gaming clips. Shorts are particularly powerful for creators that are already posting content on YouTube, but have been leveraged successfully by creators who are new to the platform as well.

Like the other major social platforms, Shorts offers the ability to tap into a massive community of YouTube users with which your clip can get fed to. Offers similar potential of going viral and getting massive views and interactions. However, it is not gaming specific - but YouTube does have a YouTube Gaming arm that’s focused on onboarding and supporting gaming creators on the platform.

Shorts has a lower bar to monetize than TikTok. YouTube launched a $100M Fund to incentivize creators to create content for Shorts and creators can earn bonuses under $100. YouTube Partners will be able to earn ad revenue from Shorts in February 2023 and keep 45% of revenue based on a share of total shorts views. Creators will also be able to become YouTube Partners based on their Shorts content in 2023, not just from their long form content.

Streamladder

Streamladder offers simple tools to help convert your Twitch Clips to TikTok format. All you have to do is enter the url to your Twitch clip, select a layout, and you're ready to export the clip or share it to TikTok. Templates make Streamladder easy to use without any prior editing experience. Streamladder does not have heavyweight editing capability like Medal and it’s optimized for posting your clips on TikTok. This is great as a quick and easy tool to turn existing content from your Twitch streams into moments that can go viral on TikTok (or Reels or Shorts). This tool is optimized for Twitch, so if you stream on other platforms, it won’t be as useful for you. Streamladder doesn’t have an associated community or any monetization features at this time.

Crossclip

Crossclip is another clip editing tool that has clip converting capabilities. Like Streamladder it offers lightweight editing. You can upload clips from Twitch or as raw files and make small edits. Crossclip is created by Streamlabs who make a lot of other popular streaming products so they have extensive experience serving creators. Like other clip converting tools, Crossclip offers tools to edit but no associated gaming community or monetization features. Streamlabs does have a number of other popular products for creators ranging from tipping to desktop streaming software.

Conclusion

We’ve covered an overview of Medal as well as other popular alternatives for clipping streams and sharing content with communities.

As the creator economy continues to grow, more tools and services will be developed that address different challenges that creators face. If you’re a gaming creator, it’s good to explore platforms built for gaming content and that have a strong gaming community in addition to working with platforms that are one-size-fits all. There is a tradeoff when it comes to more niche platforms in terms of the number of potential users you can reach and size of the overall community.

We are of course biased, but we recommend FreshCut as your home for short-form clips.

Above all - you should do what is best for you and your community. It's important to continue to try new platforms and use what works best for you!

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