The Rise of IRL Streaming in 2026: Stats, Trends & How to Start

Written By Ed Abdallah

For years, "streamer" basically meant "gamer". A person, a chair, a webcam, and a game on screen.

Not anymore.

The fastest-growing corner of live streaming has no game at all. It's creators walking through cities, cooking in their kitchens, road-tripping across countries, fishing, busking, and just living, with tens of thousands of people along for the ride. It's called IRL streaming (in real life), and in 2025 it went from side genre to main character.

We run Australia and New Zealand's #1 TikTok LIVE Creator Network, and IRL is the single biggest shift we've watched happen on the platform. Here's the data behind the boom, the creators driving it, and what it means for streamers in AU and NZ.

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What is IRL streaming?

IRL streaming is any live stream where the content is real life rather than a game or a static studio setup. That covers a huge range:

  • Walking streams and city exploring

  • Travel and road trip streams

  • Food, cooking, and market streams

  • Fishing, camping, hiking, and outdoor content

  • Events, meetups, and festival streams

  • "Come to work with me" and day-in-the-life streams

The appeal is simple: it's unscripted, unpredictable, and human. Viewers aren't watching a performance so much as hanging out with someone, and that feeling of genuine company is exactly what live streaming does better than any other format.

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The numbers: IRL and real-life content are booming

This isn't vibes. The industry data is unambiguous.

Live streaming overall is near record highs. Global live streaming viewership reached 36.4 billion hours watched in 2025, up 6 percent year on year and nearly back to the all-time peak set during the pandemic in 2021, according to Stream Hatchet's annual report.

IRL is growing faster than the market. On Twitch, IRL category viewership grew 19 percent in 2025, while Just Chatting (the talk-to-camera cousin of IRL) grew 25 percent. Non-gaming content now makes up 22 percent of all Twitch viewership, up from 20 percent the year before, per the same Stream Hatchet report.

Real-life content has taken the top spot. By early 2026, Just Chatting had become the single most-watched category across the major streaming platforms, according to Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet's Q1 2026 report. Twitch's own CEO has described the platform's evolution as a shift from gamers who entertain to entertainers who sometimes game.

TikTok LIVE is the IRL platform. In Q3 2025, TikTok LIVE generated around 9.2 billion hours watched, roughly 31 percent of all tracked live streaming watch time, per Streams Charts. And the top categories on TikTok LIVE tell the story: Chats, Fashion, and Outdoors, real-life formats all three. Streams Charts describes TikTok as ideal for IRL content and a benchmark for accessibility for both viewers and creators.

The challenger platforms are riding the same wave. Kick, where IRL and Just Chatting sit at the heart of the platform, was the fastest-growing major service in 2025, with hours watched up 131 percent year on year to 4.5 billion, per Stream Hatchet.

Put simply: across every major platform, the growth is coming from real life.

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The creators who took IRL mainstream

Two names did more than anyone to turn IRL streaming into a global spectacle.

IShowSpeed turned the IRL travel stream into an international event. His 2024 and 2025 world tours took live audiences through Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia, China, Latin America, Europe, and a 35-day, 24/7 non-stop stream across 25 US states. During his Southeast Asia tour he passed one million concurrent live viewers in Jakarta, reported as the highest ever for an English-speaking IRL streamer, and Streams Charts calculated his tours had racked up more than 43 million hours watched combined. Rolling Stone named him its Most Influential Creator of 2025. When he toured Australia in late 2024, crowds followed him through Sydney, the Gold Coast, and Melbourne like a travelling festival.

Kai Cenat proved real-life event streaming is the biggest format in the game. He was the most-watched individual streamer of 2025 with 131.9 million hours watched, and during his month-long Mafiathon 3 event became the first Twitch creator to reach one million active subscribers, per Stream Hatchet's annual report. Mafiathons aren't gaming content. They're a creator living on camera with guests, chaos, and community for weeks at a time. IRL, industrialised.

The takeaway isn't "be Speed or Kai". It's that the biggest moments in streaming are no longer happening inside games. They're happening in the real world, live.

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Why IRL works so well on TikTok LIVE specifically

TikTok LIVE is arguably the best-suited platform on earth for IRL content, for a few structural reasons:

1. It's mobile-native. Twitch was built for desktops and gaming rigs. TikTok LIVE was built for a phone in your hand, which is exactly the tool IRL streaming runs on. One device, one person, anywhere.

2. Discovery is built in. TikTok pushes LIVEs to the For You feed, including to people who don't follow you. An interesting IRL moment can pull in complete strangers mid-stream in a way that simply doesn't happen on subscription-first platforms.

3. The monetisation suits the format. Gifts flow when something is happening. IRL streams are a rolling series of moments (a reaction, a stranger interaction, a view, a fail), and each one is a natural gifting trigger. Learn how the gifting economy works here: https://www.thestreamchasers.com/live-tips/tiktok-live-gifts

4. The audience already lives there. The categories dominating TikTok LIVE (Chats, Fashion, Outdoors) are all real-life formats. You're not fighting the platform's culture. You are the platform's culture.

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How to start IRL streaming in Australia and New Zealand

If you want in, here's the honest starter kit.

Start simpler than you think. A modern phone, a decent gimbal or grip, and wireless earbuds with a mic will get you a long way. Upgrade to a dedicated mic and external battery once you're consistent. The content matters far more than the rig.

Solve your connectivity. IRL lives and dies on upload. In cities, 5G is usually fine. For road trips and remote spots, plan around coverage, carry a backup SIM on a different carrier, and accept that some of NZ's and Australia's prettiest places are also dead zones.

Pick a repeatable format. "I walk somewhere interesting every Tuesday and Thursday night" beats "random vlogs whenever". Formats give viewers a reason to come back, and consistency is what the algorithm and the audience both reward.

Stream safe. This one matters to us a lot. Never show your home, street, car rego, or identifiable routines. Watch your surroundings, don't stream your exact live location in real time when you're alone, be respectful about filming strangers, and know that venues and events can have their own filming rules. Your safety and other people's privacy come before content, every time.

Mind the guidelines. IRL streaming has its own ban traps: bystanders behaving badly on your stream, minors wandering into frame, music playing in public venues. What happens on your LIVE is treated as your LIVE. Our guide on avoiding bans covers this in depth: https://www.thestreamchasers.com/live-tips/tiktok-live-bans

Then treat it like a craft. Narrate what you're doing, keep talking to chat even when nothing is happening, and learn to create moments rather than wait for them. The best IRL streamers are tour guides, not surveillance cameras.

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Where this is heading

Every signal points the same direction. The analysts tracking this space expect Just Chatting and IRL to keep growing across platforms, audiences keep choosing personality over polish, and the biggest creators on earth keep proving the format at scale. There's also a bigger cultural undercurrent: as feeds fill up with synthetic and AI-generated content, unfiltered live humans become more valuable, not less.

For creators in AU and NZ, that's a genuine window. IRL streaming here is still early compared to the US and Asia, the platform advantage sits with TikTok LIVE, and the creators who build real-life formats now will own the space as it matures.

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Want to build an IRL streaming career with backup?

Stream Chasers is AU and NZ's #1 TikTok LIVE Creator Network. We coach creators across every format, IRL included, with strategy, campaign access, safety guidance, and a team in your time zone, all at zero cost to you.

Apply here: https://www.thestreamchasers.com/apply

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Sources

Ed Abdallah
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