Everything We Announced at TwitchCon Las Vegas

It’s day one of TwitchCon Las Vegas and we couldn’t be more excited to kick off the ultimate IRL party celebrating the Twitch community. This weekend is filled with incredible things to see and do, with shows in the Glitch Theater, Meet & Greets, the Drag Showcase, Artist Alley, musical performances, Rivals competitions, and a sneak peek of some of the new products launching over the next year. You can tune in from home to see content streamed from various stages, including /twitch, /nomnom, /TwitchRivals, and /creatorcamp.

Let’s take a look at what was announced during today’s opening ceremony. You can also watch the full keynote VOD here.

Updates Coming to Stories on Twitch

We recently launched Stories on Twitch, a new feature that helps you engage and stay connected with your community, all in one place, even when you aren’t live on Twitch. 

We’ll be updating Stories with more functionality, including the ability to upload and film short videos, tag other streamers, add links, gifs, and polls. We’re also working to give you better analytics to understand how your community is engaging with your stories.

Improvements to Featured Clips and the Clip Editor

We know how important it is for you to attract new viewers. Clips are designed to be an effective way to give new viewers an idea of what your streams are like. 

In August, we began experimenting with a scrollable Discovery Feed in the Twitch app that shows viewers a personalized mix of clips. We’ve been using the data from that experiment to refine our recommendations to viewers and get your feedback about how well it’s working.

We’re also testing a version of the Discovery Feed with live channels to see if it’s effective at helping viewers find a new live stream to watch. 

We launched Featured Clips to all streamers back in August to give you the ability to identify your best clips, which we take into account for Discovery Feed recommendations. Since launch, we’ve seen that Featured Clips are getting up to twice the number of views as regular clips. Early next year, we’ll give you the ability to set defaults on which clips are used for discovery. 

Additionally, we will add new functionality to Featured Clips including: 

• The ability to feature clips directly from the creation flow
• Adding a button in the clips Manager to Feature Clips
• Allowing moderators to select feature clips

We also want to make it easier for you to make higher quality clips, so we’re working on improving the Clip Editor by: 

• Including vertical clips in the Discovery Feed
• Allowing editors access to the Clip Editor
• Adding improved editing features such as trimming and changing aspect ratios

Collaboration is Better with Stream Together 

We’ve adjusted our focus with Guest Star to prioritize streamer to streamer collaboration. Because of this change, we are now calling Guest Star, Stream Together. 

The Stream Together feature makes it easy for up to six streamers to collaborate together while all of them are streaming, on their own channels. We have over 150,000 streamers in our opt-in beta and will be launching it to everyone later this year. 

We’re also making it even easier to use. Soon, you can simply copy a single URL into an OBS scene and we’ll handle the rest. You can still configure your scene using individual URLs for each participant, but will also have this option to streamline setup. 

You can configure guest layouts for Stream Together for either a full screen grid or use film strip mode. All of this uses the same URL whether you’re a host or a guest. 

We also give you the ability to use Stream Together in audio-only mode, so your guests can join your stream to chat via audio only.

We all know that part of the magic of Twitch is that things just happen, so we want to make it easy to have impromptu collaborations too. Soon, you’ll be able to add streamers to your own favorites list and let them know when you’re live and open to collaborating. If you’re looking to drop in on someone, you’ll be able to look at your followed channels and see when a streamer is open to collaborating. 

Additional Stream Together features are coming over the next year including:

• Shared Viewership to reflect the combined viewership of everyone streaming together
• The option to merge chat from the streams that are collaborating

Collaborations have always been a great way for streamers to grow and Stream Together makes this easier.

Fun Ways to Customize Alerts 

Twitch’s Alerts help you to express yourself and reward your community when they show their support.

Soon, we’ll be launching a Twitch exclusive feature that allows you to add your custom animated emotes to Alerts. We’re also excited to announce that we’re doubling the number of animated emote slots for all Affiliates and Partners. Plus if you use one of Twitch’s Alerts for a Hype Train or Sub, you’ll unlock even more animated emote slots. 

We will also launch new Alerts for third-party enabled interactions like tipping, so that you have more flexibility in how you encourage community support. 

More Control and Insights for Ads

Ads are an important part of how streamers earn money on Twitch. Looking forward, we’re upgrading our ad tools to give you more control over your ad experience and more insight into your ad engagement and performance on your channel.

While streamers already have this feature, we will make the Chat Countdown Timer visible to moderators so they can see when an ad is coming, giving them the option to snooze an upcoming ad break.

We’re also giving you access to new insights in Ads Manager to help you understand when to run ads and how ads perform on your channel. These changes are designed to help you to make informed decisions about how you run ads for your channel.

New Holiday Promotions

Communities love to show support for their favorite streamers and we can help boost that support by hosting big celebratory events like SUBtember, where viewers get discounted sub prices. 

We know these events are a valuable way to help streamers increase their earnings, so we’re excited to announce that we’re planning a second event this year–a holiday promotion this December. 

It’ll be everything you love about SUBtember–discounts on subs and gifts–but to spread even more cheer, we’re planning to include a discount on Bits, rewards, and a holiday themed Hype Train. Be on the lookout for more details coming soon. 

Updates to the Off-Service Conduct Policy

We see safety not only as a basic requirement for everyone on Twitch, but as an essential part of creativity and community. As our community grows and evolves, we continue to examine and evolve our own safety approach. Whoever you are and whatever kind of community you want to build, you can only be your authentic self on stream when you feel it’s safe to do so. 

Our Off-Service Conduct Policy is designed to protect the Twitch community, recognizing that misconduct that takes place on or off Twitch can be extremely harmful. To further protect our streamers, we’re adding doxxing and swatting to the list of Off-Service Conduct behaviors we will enforce against. This update to our Off-Service policy takes effect today. 

Introducing Channel-Level Chat Warnings 

Many of you have told us that you use an informal three-strike system when keeping your  community safe - a warning, a timeout, and then a ban. Right now, to issue a warning, streamers or mods have to message chatters directly. Early next year, we’ll give you the ability to send anonymous warnings to chatters, keeping you better protected while still enabling communication. The user will need to acknowledge the warning prior to being able to chat again. 

Staying Safe with AutoMod and Smart Detection 

AutoMod is a critical tool for keeping your chat safe. Earlier this year, we began experimenting with a new AutoMod category called Smart Detection, which tailors AutoMod to your channel by learning from the moderation actions that you and your mods take. As of today, this feature is live on all English-language channels with a broader rollout to follow.

An Update to Twitch Embeds

Twitch embeds are an important tool for streamers and third party websites to distribute Twitch content. However, we’ve seen a very small number of sites that use embeds in a way that was not intended. 

On Nov. 1, we are introducing a change to our embeds policy to prohibit autoplay when the Twitch stream is not a substantive or meaningful component of the page. For sites that do not comply with this policy, we will disable autoplay for embeds starting Nov. 15. You can find more details in our developer forum.

Simulcasting Policy Updates

And finally back in August, we updated our simulcasting policy to allow simulcasting on mobile services like TikTok and Instagram. 

As of today, you can now simulcast on any live streaming service. We believe that you should have the freedom to decide which services you want to live stream on. You can learn more about our guidelines in our Simulcasting Help article. 

We’re excited to share more details about today’s announcements in the coming months, on the blog and in Patch Notes. In the meantime, please continue to share your input and feedback via UserVoice. 

See you in Chat!