After a successful 2022, streaming giant Twitch has revealed their plans to ship new features in 2023.
Through a detailed “Open Letter” Chief Product Officer Tom Verilli revealed Twitch’s plans to ship a plethora of new features that improve the overall streaming experience for viewers alongside new tools that intend to help Streamers.
Twitch has revealed Sound Bites are a new planned first-party sound alerts that allow viewers to pay to interact with and support their favorite streamers. Also, more updates to Cheering bits aim to fullfill the streaming hiant’s intent to gibe streamers the ability to recognize viewers in “more personalized ways.”
Subtember was a Twitch event that granted viewers huge discounts on subscriptions or “subs” purchased. The initiative was met with huge success, and Twitch looks to expand on such “localized initiatives “ to help streamers earn more. Twitch’s plans for 2023 also offering viewers’ personalized discounts. The discount will be based on the viewer’s personal behaviour on streams.
The updated Twitch will also introduce channel skins and clickable branded graphics streamers streamers can place on their channel page for a “less disruptive and more engaging” sponsorship experience. Tools to help edit and export clips for vertical, short-form video formats and making it easier to promote your stream on other platforms by working with Twitter to improve how clips and live stream links play in the feed.
New tools for Streamers
Twitch will also be adding more tools to help viewers discover streamer content, including:
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- Pinned Clips, which will allow you to pin up to 20 clips to your channel page. These clips will give new viewers a better idea of what your stream is about, and will be fully at your discretion and include safety controls.
- Stream Title emotes will let streamers add emotes into the stream title.
- The addition of Upcoming Streams section is coming to the Twitch mobile app. This intends to help viewers keep track of and tune in to streams for all the streamers they follow, all in one place.
Creator Home and Data Driven Analytics to improve Stream
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- ‘Creator Home’ is a personalized, dynamic ‘homebase’ that displays the most relevant tips and actionable recommendations that intends to help the streamer. ‘Creator Home’ will be available for all Twitch Affiliates and Partners.
- This also includes the addition of more analytic updates, that will include:
- Tag impression analytics that display the number of viewers who viewed the stream within a tag-filtered Browse page or in a Twitch search result for each tag.
- Data on the best days and times to stream in various games or categories to help you reach more viewers.
- Audience retention data to help the streamer understand every stream’s engaging and retaining viewers.
Updates to help streamers run ads on their channel
- We’re updating the Ads Incentive Program to reflect requests from the community to make the program easier and more flexible. You can stay opted in once you’re in, and you’ll have more flexibility to adjust the number of ads you’re running.
- We’re also improving the ad running experience. We have heard from you all that it can be difficult to know when an ad is about to run, thereby making it difficult to prepare yourself and your community for the interruption. We will make changes to Ads Manager to help you have more visibility and control over when the ads roll.
- The streaming giant is also working on launching a special subscription called Twitch Turbo — which offers perks like ad-free viewing and chat upgrades to emotes and badges — better and more relevant for the community. Updates regarding this will be displayed later this year.
Q&A Tool and In-app messaging product
- Twitch is planning launch a messaging product that will allow streamers to send video and clip messages, targeted to followers or subscribers, while you’re offline.
- The streaming service is also building a Q&A tool to allow streamers to take prompts from their audience, with mod tools that will allow them to vet and approve the links before showing them on stream.
Guest Star Improvements
- Twitch is deploying browser support for Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari and launching more granular audio tooling for streamers who want more control over their guest’s audio (e.g. auto muting doubled sources, turning off echo cancellation for musical guests).
- The streaming giant also revealed plans to experiment with experiences that will enable “truly cross channel streaming experiences.”
Customizable Tags and Mobile Discovery Improvements
- The platform also shed light on their efforts to build up on customizable tags introduced in the last year that let streamers describe their stream in their own words by building the backend infrastructure to identify and collect streams related to the same topic (e.g. speedrunning), and feature these collections all over Twitch. Twitch will also make content collections browsable and persistent, which means viewers will be able to find the communities of streamers who stream using a custom tag with a fixed URL.
- This also includes the addition of a new discovery feature on mobile that will allow viewers to scroll through a feed of recommended channels and clips easily.
To improve the reliability and stability of the features, Twitch will also roll out several experimental updates to gather streamer feedback on it’s tools. “This year, to help enable that feedback, we’re trying a few new things to help make those conversations easier and more frequent.” said the blog. One of Twitch’s efforts to gather new gather player feedback is the addition of an experiments help page. The new help page intends to give streamers “more insight” into some of the experiments the developers are running on Twitch.
“We love seeing what you can do when you’re enabled and empowered. We’re launching these features and tools because we want you to be able to build the communities you want to build, more easily and more reliably.” emphasized Twitch in the 2023 blog.
For a detailed breakdown of each upcoming feature and for more insight into Twitch’s plans for the new year, players can view the official patch notes stream here.
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