How a Five-Person Team Built the Go-To Streaming App on Meta Quest

This developer story is part of our Build Faster, Earn More series featuring practical playbooks on how to deploy the latest tools and grow with your audience on Meta Quest.

BeamXR Live⁠ is a live-streaming app for Meta Quest that lets anyone broadcast their VR or mixed reality experience to Twitch, YouTube, and other platforms directly from their headset, without a capture card, PC, or extra setup. Users can add custom overlays, interact with live chat, and clip highlights, all from Quest itself.

Since launch, it's become the go-to streaming app on Quest, hitting one million minutes viewed in its first 12 weeks, earning a stellar Store on Meta Quest rating, and building a growing subscription business through word of mouth.

Below, we dig into how they built it: the technical pivot that set their quality bar, the freemium strategy that grew their user base, and the lessons other developers can take away.

In 2022, streaming from a VR headset was either expensive, unreliable, or required workarounds most users couldn't figure out. Paul Miller, CEO of BeamXR, kept hearing the same thing from developers: they wanted streaming capabilities in their apps, but didn't have the time or resources to build them.

"We spoke to a lot of people who thought it was a fantastic idea," Miller says. "A good number had started on the journey of creating some kind of streaming application, but it was away from their day job. For us, it's about specializing in the streaming and making sure it's the highest quality."

Miller assembled a small team of five, including Rory Clark as lead developer. Clark brought years of VR development experience, including work on hand tracking and spatial interaction, along with a doctoral research background in VR.

Together, they set out to break down the barrier of the headset and let people share what they're experiencing seamlessly. Weeks into development, they hit their first defining technical choice.

When BeamXR started building for Quest, they initially used software encoding. Three to four weeks in, the studio made a critical pivot to hardware encoding.

"Both the quality and the performance massively improved for us," Clark says. "As soon as we hit hardware encoding, we were able to do essentially higher quality than you would get through the native recording, but streaming."

That decision gave BeamXR Live streaming quality that, according to Clark, approaches or exceeds what Quest captures through native recording, while keeping performance overhead low enough to run alongside demanding titles. The team set a high bar from day one: if you're streaming a game, the video has to be flawless, on time, and faithful to what you're playing.

"If you're streaming a game, it can't just be good enough," Miller says. "It can't be glitching here and there. That video stream has got to be on time, and it's got to represent what you're playing."

Clark used the Android emulator in early development, since the Meta Spatial Simulator hadn't been released yet. As the platform tooling improved, the team adopted the Meta Spatial Simulator for faster iteration, and Clark now uses Meta Quest Developer Hub and the Developer Dashboard daily.

To ensure their app met all Store requirements and correctly implemented the billing and subscription APIs, Clark connected the latest Meta AI tools to his development environment.

Recent advances now enable developers to integrate AI tools directly into their workflow, where it can reference Meta's platform documentation, flag issues with API implementation, and answer questions about Quest-specific requirements in context. Clark's team now uses this AI-assisted workflow as a regular part of their development process, and other developers can set it up through the Meta AI Tools documentation.

BeamXR Live launched as a free app because the team wanted to get the streaming experience right before introducing premium features.

"We had a good idea of the demand, but we wanted to understand how people actually used the app before we started to charge for things," Miller says. "For us, it was important to get that right first."

As BeamXR Live's user base grew, the team started asking: what would add value beyond the core streaming experience?

The team's active community played an important role in shaping the product roadmap. Through ongoing conversations with users, the team learned that streamers wanted more tools to build their brand identity on Quest, specifically customizable stream overlays and live-stream clipping for on-demand video. These became the foundation of BeamXR Live's premium tier.

The subscription model is now performing according to the team's projections. "They're good early signs for growing a really successful business," Miller says.

BeamXR Live has grown entirely through word of mouth, social sharing, and a few smart product decisions. The free tier includes a BeamXR watermark on streams, which helps new users discover the app.

"People are getting a high-quality streaming product for free," Clark says, "and the watermark helps other Quest users find us when they see a great stream." For streamers who want a clean, fully branded look, removing the watermark is one of the premium subscription features.

The app's stellar rating on the Store has also been a growth driver. "That's been a critical focus from the start," Miller says. "We think it's driving a lot of people to the app and giving confidence that when they download it, they're going to get a good experience."

These good experiences are fueling a remarkable story: after reaching one million minutes viewed in just 12 weeks after launch, today it's routine for BeamXR Live to reach 300,000 minutes viewed in a single day.

For Clark and Miller, the most rewarding feedback comes from streamers who are growing dedicated audiences through the app.

"We've seen users who were completely new to streaming pick up the app and build dedicated audiences within their first couple of months," Clark says. "Some have grown to several hundred followers on their chosen platform, which is exciting to see. The low barrier to entry means anyone with something interesting to share can get started right away."

Some use cases have truly surprised the team. One streamer takes their Quest headset into wetlands and streams biology lessons in mixed reality, using passthrough to show the physical environment alongside digital overlays and even a microscope feed. "We were not expecting anyone to do this," Clark says.

The stream blends the real-world field environment with educational graphics, creating a learning experience that would be impossible without the combination of mixed reality and live streaming.

Other streamers have built dedicated followings thanks in part to the high production quality that previously required expensive capture equipment or complicated multi-device setups. Now, these users can seamlessly broadcast VR gameplay with professional overlays, custom branding, and live chat integration.

Beyond consumer streaming, BeamXR is building an enterprise business through their developer SDK. Corporate training teams can embed BeamXR's streaming technology directly into their training platforms, giving educators a live window into what each learner sees during a session. For companies running training programs at scale, that visibility helps turn VR from an isolated experience into an observable (and coachable) one.

The team is also exploring how AI can improve the streaming workflow itself, from helping users identify their strongest content to shortening the path from live session to published clip.

Looking further ahead, they see potential in the glasses form factor. "Our underlying technology would work with AI glasses," Miller says. "As the growth of that technology continues, I think there will be opportunities there for us."

Your Android skills transfer directly to Quest. Bring your app over with these resources:

BeamXR built the leading streaming app on Quest with five people and familiar Android tooling. Streaming was just one open category, and there are plenty more. Use the tools and resources above to build the next category-defining app on Quest.