The annual TwitchCon fan event for livestreamers and their fans is happening right now in Long Beach, California,, and Amazon’s video platform told its assembled audience about some new features it is rolling out.
As part of a keynote presentation, Twitch chief executive Emmett Shear and director of programming Marcus “DjWheat” Graham talked about how the service will change in the future. Some new tools will help broadcasters better understand their audiences and use them to help grow other channels. Other features will gamify the Twitch Partner process. The company is doing all of this to grow both its total audience size as well as how engaged that audience is.
Here’s a breakdown of the biggest additions to the Twitch platform:
- Stream summary: At the end of each stream, Twitch will now breakdown important stats for broadcasters. This will help people quickly understand important figures like total viewers, new followers, and chat messages.
- Achievements: Twitch will now award achievements to streamers as they reach milestones toward the Affiliate and Partner status.
- Raids: Chat will now have a /raid feature that will let creators easily drive traffic to other channels. You can also see if someone raided you, and you can even control who is permitted to raid you to avoid harassment.
- Premieres: Channels can set up special live-viewing events for uploaded content.
- Rooms: Broadcasters can set up special chat silos for different groups. Examples include moderators, subscribers, followers, and more.
- Subscription gifting: This enables you to buy a subscription to a channel for someone else.
- In-extension purchases: Twitch now supports software extensions, and the company is planning to give streamers access to earn revenue from digital goods sold through these add-ons. This could potentially even bring loot crates to the Twitch viewing experience.
- Rituals: Creators can set up special events to celebrate certain actions. If a new person joins the chat, it can trigger a ritual that alerts everyone else.
In-extension purchases, rituals, stream summaries, achievements, and raids are all coming in November. Premieres, room, and subscription gifting is all due out before the end of the year.
