TwitchCon Rotterdam Announcements

Streamer Achievement Program

This TwitchCon, Twitch are celebrating streamers who have reached tremendous heights in their streaming journey with the Streamer Achievement Program. Building a community takes hard work, creativity, and dedication and reaching Partner means taking all of those qualities to the next level. You can find the full blog here and below.

There are three tiers of statues that will be given to streamers who reach three major milestones in their Twitch career:

• 5 million hours watch
• 50 million hours watched
• 250 million hours watched

Creator Clubs

Today, Twitch introduces Creator Clubs, a new program to help streamers find communities around shared interests. Connecting like-minded creators can help deepen their sense of belonging, help them access new shared audiences, and find new ways to succeed and grow on Twitch.

Twitch are modelling these around Unity Guilds with some key differences. Like Guilds, Clubs will be open to both Affiliates and Partners. Unlike Guilds, which are built around shared identities, Clubs centre on the creator’s interests.

Twitch are launching two clubs to start: DJs and IRL and plan to add more clubs by the end of the year. Members will have exclusive access to a dedicated Club Discord server, access to Club events, and monthly workshops hosted by Twitch.

To join, Twitch will be looking for members who stream actively, and primarily in that club’s category. Interested creators can apply to join the first two clubs at the end of July.

Mobile App

Twitch are redesigning their mobile app to make it easier for new viewers to find content and existing viewers to enjoy shorter, more frequent visits. While live streaming will always be the foundation of Twitch, 70% of new viewers start watching Twitch on mobile.

Twitch recently released an updated version of the app to a small group of users who have been providing feedback since May. Since then, Twitch have released updates that address autoplay settings and improve performance. Twitch are continuing to iterate the app and will share more details in the coming weeks.

Stories on Twitch give streamers an easy way to connect with their entire community directly on the Twitch mobile app, even when they aren’t live. On June 24th, Twitch made it possible for Partners to upload up to 60 seconds of video to their stories and Twitch will soon give Affiliates access later this summer. Twitch will also be bringing Stories viewing to the web experience in the coming months.

Creating Clips

Twitch are making the process of creating clips even easier by optimizing the creation flow. When creating a new Clip, Twitch will automatically generate a portrait version and landscape version of the Clip, making it easy for streamers to edit, title, save, and feature Clips in one step. Portrait Clips will automatically be shown on mobile surfaces, like the Discovery Feed, and later on the mobile Channel Page. Landscape Clips will continue to be the default on desktop. Lastly, to give viewers a way to support the streamers they love, viewers will be able to directly export Clips to third party social sites later this year.

Stream Together

Collaboration helps streamers grow by helping each streamer reach new viewers who may not have found their channel otherwise. For new streamers, it’s a great way to stream without the pressure of doing everything alone. Planning collaborations can be tough, so Twitch will soon be launching a new feature within Stream Together that allows streamers to easily drop in on other streamers who are live without any advance setup or planning.

Streamers can look at their following tab to see who is available for collaboration and if they’re interested in joining someone’s stream, they can ‘drop in’ - there’s no need to reach out to set up a scheduled collaboration.

When a streamer accepts a call from another streamer, the Stream Together session will automatically begin. Streamers can also pause calls entirely if they aren’t interested in collaborating.

Power-ups

Earlier this month Twitch launched Power-ups, a new way for viewers to support streamers they love while unleashing special effects on their favourite channels with Bits. There’s currently 3 options, but Twitch will be launching several more options this year including seasonal message effects, text to speech capabilities, and sound alerts. Twitch are also looking into how they can work with third-party developers to support the many things streamers are already doing through extensions.

DJ Program

Earlier this month Twitch announced their DJ Program, a first-of-its-kind deal with rights holders that allows DJs to stream the vast majority of popular music in a new DJ Category. Twitch are excited to share that the enrolment program will open on August 1st and the DJ Category will go live on August 8th. Twitch will also be promoting DJ content on Twitch on August 8th to celebrate!

Enhanced Broadcasting

Twitch launched the Enhanced Broadcasting beta in January and are excited to share that it’s now available to all streamers using the latest version of OBS Studio. Enhanced Broadcasting makes content more accessible to viewers all over the world, and gives streamers more control over their video quality via client-side encoding and automatic configuration. Enhanced Broadcasting paves the way for better technology that everyone will benefit from including vertical live video, advanced codecs such as HEVC and AV1, and 1440p/4k streaming.

For more information on any of today’s announcements, visit Twitch's blog.