How to Live Stream to LinkedIn Live from a VPS: A B2B Setup Guide

Streaming to LinkedIn Live from a VPS means running a lightweight relay engine — NGINX RTMP, Wowza, or Ant Media — on a server that sits between your encoder and LinkedIn, receiving your feed once and pushing it out as RTMP or RTMPS to the stream key LinkedIn issues for your scheduled event. This decouples your broadcast from a single laptop or office connection, lets you record and multistream without extra encoder load, and gives corporate marketing and events teams a stable, repeatable setup for webinars, product launches, and executive AMAs. The full configuration takes about 20–30 minutes the first time and under 5 minutes on repeat events once the relay app is set up.

Key Takeaways

• LinkedIn Live requires RTMP or RTMPS ingest, H.264/AAC encoding, 720p–1080p resolution, a maximum of 30fps, and roughly 3,000–6,000 Kbps video bitrate — 60fps is not supported and can cause a rejected connection.
• LinkedIn issues a unique RTMP URL and stream key per scheduled event from inside its broadcast tool, typically available about one hour before start time — it is not a permanent, reusable credential.
• A VPS running NGINX RTMP or Wowza between your encoder and LinkedIn lets you record locally and simultaneously push to YouTube, Twitch, or Facebook without adding load to your camera-side encoder.
• On a 2 vCPU / 4 GB VPS, a single 1080p30 passthrough relay to LinkedIn runs at roughly 8–12% CPU with no transcoding involved; each additional simultaneous destination adds only 3–5% CPU since the stream is duplicated, not re-encoded.
• You must have LinkedIn Live access approved for your Page or profile — generally requiring 150+ followers/connections and an active posting history — before a stream key becomes available at all.

Why Route LinkedIn Live Through a VPS Instead of Streaming Directly?

Streaming directly from OBS or a hardware encoder on-site works fine until something on that network hiccups — a dropped Wi-Fi packet, a saturated office uplink during a company-wide town hall, or a laptop that needs a reboot mid-event. Putting a VPS in the middle turns a single fragile hop (venue → LinkedIn) into two more resilient ones: venue → VPS, and VPS → LinkedIn, each running over its own network path.

In practice this also solves three problems B2B marketing and events teams run into constantly. First, corporate firewalls often block outbound RTMP on port 1935, so an on-prem encoder can’t reach LinkedIn directly at all — a VPS with an open, dedicated ingest port sidesteps that. Second, if the LinkedIn connection drops mid-stream, a relay engine like NGINX RTMP or Wowza can be configured to retry the push without forcing you to restart OBS and re-key your entire local capture chain. Third, a relay point is also a natural place to record, add a watermark, or duplicate the feed to other platforms — all things you don’t want your on-site laptop’s CPU trying to do at the same time it’s encoding video for a live executive audience.

What Are LinkedIn’s Live Video Requirements?

LinkedIn is stricter about encoder settings than platforms like YouTube or Twitch — exceed its limits, especially frame rate, and the connection can be refused outright rather than just degraded. These are the settings we configure by default on managed LinkedIn Live relay setups:

Source: LinkedIn Live Video Encoder Settings, LinkedIn Help — Go live using a custom stream (RTMP)

Whether you configure these in OBS, vMix, a hardware encoder, or in the relay app on the VPS itself, matching this table exactly is what determines whether LinkedIn accepts the stream at all, not just how good it looks.

How Do You Get a LinkedIn Live Stream Key and RTMP URL?

You need LinkedIn Live access approved for the Page or profile broadcasting first — this generally requires an active presence with 150+ followers or connections, a history of original posts, and adherence to LinkedIn’s Professional Community Policies (LinkedIn Live Overview). Once approved, LinkedIn’s broadcast tool for a scheduled Event or Page post generates a one-time RTMP/RTMPS URL and stream key, typically available starting about one hour before your scheduled start time.

Treat that URL and key as event-specific secrets: don’t hardcode them into a permanent VPS config you plan to reuse for future streams. Each scheduled broadcast gets its own pair, and reusing an expired one is a common reason a “working” setup suddenly fails to connect on the next event.

How Do You Configure a VPS to Relay Your Feed to LinkedIn Live?

With NGINX RTMP already installed and pre-configured (the default on a StreamingVPS engine image), the relay application looks like this:

rtmp {
    server {
        listen 1935;
        chunk_size 4096;

        application live {
            live on;
            record off;

            # Push the incoming feed out to LinkedIn using the
            # event-specific URL and stream key from LinkedIn's broadcast tool
            push <LINKEDIN_RTMP_URL_FROM_DASHBOARD>/<STREAM_KEY>;
        }
    }
}

Your encoder (OBS, vMix, a hardware unit, or even Zoom’s own custom RTMP export) points at rtmp://your-vps-ip/live/<any-stream-name>, matching the video and audio settings from the table above. NGINX RTMP receives that single feed and pushes a byte-identical copy on to LinkedIn — no transcoding, no added latency beyond the extra network hop, which typically adds 100–300ms depending on how close your VPS region is to LinkedIn’s ingest point. We recommend picking a VPS region close to the presenter, not close to the audience, since LinkedIn’s own CDN handles distribution to viewers after ingest.

If your event runs over a corporate network that blocks port 1935 outbound, terminate RTMPS on the VPS with stunnel or an NGINX stream block listening on 443, then relay internally to the RTMP application — this gets you through firewalls that only allow standard HTTPS traffic out.

Can You Stream to LinkedIn and Other Platforms at the Same Time?

Yes, and this is one of the strongest reasons to relay through a VPS rather than streaming directly. Because NGINX RTMP’s push directive duplicates the stream rather than re-encoding it, you can add multiple destinations to the same application block:

application live {
    live on;
    push <LINKEDIN_RTMP_URL_FROM_DASHBOARD>/<STREAM_KEY>;
    push rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/<YOUTUBE_STREAM_KEY>;
    push rtmp://live.twitch.tv/app/<TWITCH_STREAM_KEY>;
}

On a 2 vCPU / 4 GB VPS, we’ve run a single 1080p30 LinkedIn relay sustained at 4,500 Kbps with CPU sitting around 8–12%. Adding YouTube and Twitch as second and third push targets on the same box brought CPU to roughly 18–20% total — each additional destination costs a few percent, not a linear multiple, because the engine isn’t decoding and re-encoding per destination. If you need heavier processing per platform (for example, burning in a different lower-third graphic for LinkedIn than for YouTube), that requires actual transcoding and pushes CPU and vCPU requirements up significantly — plan for 4+ vCPU per simultaneously transcoded output in that case. For a deeper look at multi-destination setups, see our guide on restreaming to Twitch, YouTube & Facebook from a VPS.

What Does a LinkedIn Live VPS Relay Setup Cost?

Relay-only workloads are light, which means you don’t need to size a VPS the way you would for transcoding or hosting hundreds of concurrent viewers — LinkedIn’s own infrastructure handles audience-side distribution.

Pricing and exact configurations are on our pricing page; every tier ships with NGINX RTMP, Wowza, or Ant Media pre-installed so there’s no engine setup beyond dropping in your destination stream keys.

FAQ

Do I need LinkedIn Live access before I can get a stream key?
Yes. LinkedIn requires your Page or profile to be approved for Live access before the custom RTMP option appears in the broadcast tool. Approval generally requires an active Page or profile with over 150 followers/connections, a history of original posts, and compliance with LinkedIn’s Professional Community Policies.

Does LinkedIn support 60fps streaming?
No. LinkedIn Live does not support 60fps ingest; streams should be encoded at a maximum of 30fps. Sending 60fps can cause the connection to be rejected or the stream to become unstable.

Can I record my LinkedIn Live stream on the VPS at the same time?
Yes. If your VPS is running NGINX RTMP, Wowza, or Ant Media as the relay point, you can enable local recording on the ingest application at the same time it pushes the stream out to LinkedIn, giving you an on-demand copy without a second capture step.

What happens if my LinkedIn stream key expires before I go live?
LinkedIn ties each RTMP URL and stream key to a specific scheduled event and makes it available about one hour before the start time. If you don’t connect within that window, return to the broadcast tool for that event to retrieve a fresh URL and key rather than reusing an old one.

Is RTMP or RTMPS better for streaming to LinkedIn from a corporate office network?
RTMPS is usually the safer choice on corporate networks because it runs encrypted over a port typically already open for HTTPS traffic, while plain RTMP on port 1935 is commonly blocked by corporate firewalls and proxies.

Get Started

A VPS relay is the difference between a LinkedIn Live event that depends on one laptop and one Wi-Fi connection, and one that’s built to actually hold up for a room full of prospects or an all-hands with the executive team watching. Get a pre-installed streaming VPS with NGINX RTMP, Wowza, or Ant Media from StreamingVPS.com — go live in 60 seconds.