Twitch Details Several Updates Coming to Its Platform

Twitch detailed several updates during its monthly Patch Notes livestream Thursday. The Amazon-owned streaming platform will begin experimenting later this year with giving streamers the ability to tag another channel in their title, letting viewers interact with that tag and follow that channel without leaving the stream they’re watching. Twitch will also begin experimenting with reactions—Funny, Hype. Love, Oh No, Whaaaa?—that viewers can use to respond to moments in streams, with those reactions to be shared anonymously after each stream so that the streamers can learn how their community reacted to key moments and adjust their content going forward. Some streamers will see an overview of reactions for each stream in the viewer engagement panel of their analytics dashboard, with the exact breakdown of reactions for each moment during their stream. In December, Twitch will begin experimenting with a Raider Chat Highlight so streamers can see which chatters came to their channel from a raid, giving them the opportunity to engage with new audiences and grow them community. Twitch provided an update on the Guest Star feature it rolled out globally at the beginning of the month, allowing up to five guests with Twitch accounts to join livestreams. The platform said it has been used more than 5,500 times since Nov. 1, and more reporting options have been added, including backstage recording/reporting, where bad actors can be reported for their actions before they’re brought on stream, and letting guests join via the mobile application, which began rolling out this week. Twitch said more audio control options are on tap soon for hosts and guests, along with the ability to customize and move nameplates and support for browsers like Edge, Firefox and Safari. Pinned Chat, which Twitch had been testing, rolled out to everyone Thursday, enabling streamers and moderators to pin new or existing messages in chat for a select amount of time, which makes it easier to share important messages with the community. Later this year, Twitch will update its Customizable Tags feature with autocomplete functionality, making it easier for streamers to add tags and for viewers to find them. The layout was redesigned for the platform’s analytics and insights, with the current insights pages—Achievements, Channel Analytics and Stream Summary—separated into six pages: Achievements, Discovery, Earnings, Engagement Overview and Stream Summary. This will happen later in November, with more improvements coming in 2023. Twitch began experimenting with an updated interface for IRL (in real life) streamers on mobile, giving them more flexibility, letting them use landscape or portrait mode and adding chat as an overlay. The platform plans to roll this out to more streamers in the near future. Analytics will come to mobile in early 2023, starting with Stream Summary. Twitch added more clarity to help streamers differentiate between gross and net payouts and show their proximity to the payout threshold, with all monetized streamers seeing estimated tax withholding and payment fees in their dashboard. Finally, the platform detailed changes to its Ads Incentive Program, based on feedback from its community, explaining in a blog post, “Over this month and the next few, we’ll be offering a reduced ad-density option. For example, streamers will see an option that is a couple of minutes lower than the ad-density they ran last month. Higher ad-density options will still be available. We’re also aware that there’s worry around being unable to complete offers given the hours to broadcast requirements. Should streamers be unable to complete the amount of hours in the offer, they will be paid at a prorated rate. For example, if a streamer streams for 50% of the time in their offer amount during the month, they will be paid 50% of the fixed incentive amount. We are working on an updated, more flexible version of the Ads Incentive Program and will have more to share early next year.”

Streaming & OTT

Twitch Details Several Updates Coming to Its Platform

They include tweaks to its Ads Incentive Program

David Cohen

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David Cohen