Everything We Announced at TwitchCon Rotterdam

We’re coming to you live from Rotterdam as we kick off TwitchCon Europe 2024. We’re so excited to be back in the Netherlands celebrating our incredible streamers and global community. It’s only the first day, but we can already tell this weekend will be one for the books. Getting together IRL is always a blast, and you don’t want to miss this weekend’s line up–from featured DJs, to Twitch Rivals Ultimate Challenge, to the Drag Showcase and Weekend Millionaire trivia in Glitch Theater, to cool art in the Artist’s Alley, and much more.

This morning, we announced new programs and features and shared more about what’s ahead on our product roadmap. Want to watch the full Opening Ceremony? Check out the VOD here.

If you’re tuning in from home, you can watch content streamed from various stages, including /twitch, /nomnom, /TwitchRivals, and /creatorcamp. The full schedule of content for the weekend is here.

There’s nothing quite like TwitchCon to remind you what makes Twitch so special. Today was the perfect opportunity to share our updated mission statement – used to guide the work happening at Twitch day in and day out. Today, and in the future.

Our mission is simple and important: Create belonging by enabling streamers to build community.

Our service is all about building meaningful community – we’re a place where you can be who you are and belong. We’re continuously developing new features, programs and experiences to deepen this sense of belonging and create more ways for people to come together. Below are some of the ways we are pursuing this mission and helping you build community this year.

Redesigning the mobile app

For the first time since 2019, we released an updated look for our mobile app at the end of May to a small group of users. While most of the time people spend on Twitch comes from our desktop experience, 70% of new viewers start watching Twitch on mobile–and this number is growing. Viewers spend more time watching a stream when they are on a desktop, but they come to Twitch more regularly from their mobile devices. These updates are designed to make it easier for new viewers to find content, and for existing viewers to catch up with their favorite streamers and discover new ones.

The mobile app is designed to quickly get you to the content you want to watch. When you open the app, you’ll land on a feed of live streams so you can preview streams and pick what to watch. The best way to decide if you want to watch a stream is to actually see what’s happening first. This live feed is a personalized experience based on the streams you watch. When you find something you like, a simple tap brings you to the channel page.

Want to browse clips to catch up on what has been happening, instead? Swipe to the left and now you are in a clips feed. Want to check out new stories? They’ll appear at the top of the feed when you open the app, or you can access them by tapping the upper right corner of the screen.

If you know what you’re looking for and simply want to watch a streamer you follow, tap the follow drawer indicated by the heart icon in the upper left of the screen. This will open a list of your followed channels that are live, just like on our website.

We’ve received community feedback and have updated the app to make it better for streamers and viewers. Since launching the experiment, we released an update to respect your autoplay settings in the feed and improve app performance issues. We’re actively working on adding mute functionality directly to the feed, enabling PIP on Android over feed so you can use the following list while keeping your current channel open, and continuing to improve app performance. We’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks.

Bringing video to Stories, and Stories to desktop

Stories are a great way to reach your community members – whether you want to build hype for your next stream, share a great clip for those who couldn’t be there live, or stay connected on your day off. We are excited to announce that video creation and upload will be coming to stories. Partners began getting access this week, and Affiliates will be getting access later this summer.

We’ll also be bringing Stories viewing to the web experience in the coming months. This means your community will be able to keep in touch with your latest updates no matter where they’re tuning in.

Optimizing Clips for discovery

Stories connect you with your community on Twitch, but we know that an important part of building your community is sharing engaging content on your social channels off Twitch.

To help you improve Clips for sharing, we’ll begin automatically generating a portrait version alongside the landscape version in the Clip creation flow. From there, you can edit, title, save, and feature Clips in one easy step. You can also choose to download or export the clip to your socials, just like you can today. By automatically optimizing your clips for where viewers are finding your content, you can put less time into reformatting clips and more time into doing what you do best.

Portrait clips will automatically be shown on mobile surfaces like our new mobile 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. As always, you get to control who can create and share Clips from your stream.

Dropping in makes collaboration easier than ever

We’ve made a lot of improvements to Stream Together to make it easier and more straightforward to use. In a few weeks we are launching a new feature within Stream Together that allows streamers to drop in on other streamers who are live, without any advance setup or planning.

Streamers will be able to see who is open to collaborating via the left nav. From there, all you have to do is knock on their door– if they’re open to collaborating they can accept and an audio connection will begin immediately on both streams. Switch your OBS scene, and now you are hanging out on a video call while you’re both live.

Streamers have complete control over who can knock on their door and can easily set a list of favorites within Stream Manager. Streamers can also pause requests entirely if they aren’t interested in collaborating.

Customizing Power-ups

Two weeks ago we launched Power-ups – on-stream interactions redeemed using Bits that give viewers new, fun ways to take part in the streams they love. We launched Power-ups with three options: Message Effects to stand out in chat, On-screen Celebrations to hype up any moment, and Gigantify an Emote. In just the first week post-launch, we saw almost 1 million Power-ups unleashed across Twitch.

While this is a great start, we’re continuing to invest in Power-ups this year to make them more interactive, and give streamers and their communities more control. We’ll be launching several more ready-to-go Power-up options, like seasonal Message Effects, text to speech capabilities, and sound-based Alerts this year, as well as customizable options for Streamers. We’re also looking into how we can work with third-party developers to support the many things streamers are already doing through extensions.

We expect to have customization up and running later this year, so start thinking about what the Power-ups community might get excited about.

Enhanced Broadcasting will be generally available in OBS Studio and XSplit Broadcaster

We launched the Enhanced Broadcasting beta in partnership with NVIDIA and OBS in January and are excited to report it will be available to all streamers using the upcoming version of OBS Studio or XSplit Broadcaster. Enhanced Broadcasting gives streamers more control over their video quality via client-side encoding and automatic configuration. Enhanced Broadcasting also paves the way for better technology, including vertical live video, advanced codecs such as HEVC and AV1.

DJ enrollment dates

Earlier this month, we announced the creation of our first-of-its-kind DJ program. Since 2020, the number of DJs streaming on Twitch has quadrupled, with thousands building communities of music fans here. We’ve been thrilled by the positive feedback from DJs on Twitch, and those learning about Twitch for the first time through this announcement. We announced on stage that enrollment in the program will open in August. The Category will go live and we’ll begin promoting DJ content on Twitch later this summer.

Creator Clubs

We also introduced Creator Clubs, a new program to help streamers find communities around shared interests. Clubs are similar to 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 center on the creator’s content.

Members will have exclusive access to a dedicated Club Discord server where they can connect with other creators within their community. Each Club’s Discord will include resources, channels to solicit support from Club members and Twitch Staff, and a library of toolboxes on monetization, engagement, and content development strategies. Members will also have access to Club events and monthly workshops led by Twitch. Clubs will evolve over time to meet the needs of their members, and we’ll solicit member input for topics, events, and workshops.

We’re launching two global clubs to start: DJs and IRL, and aim to add more clubs by the end of the year. Applications for the first two Twitch Clubs will open at the end of July.

Streamer Achievement Awards

And lastly, we announced the Streamer Achievement Program. This program recognizes streamers who have dedicated their careers to building a community on Twitch, and in doing so, have hit viewership milestones most can only dream of. Beginning today, we’ll be honoring their achievements with a special memento from Twitch – the Bleed Purple Statue.

There are three tiers of Bleed Purple Statues, which will be given to streamers who reach three impressive levels of achievement:

Purple: 5 million hours watched

Marble: 50 million hours watched

Chrome: 250 million hours watched is Chrome

Congrats to /LittleBigWhale, who just received her statue live on the Glitch Theater stage, for being the first to receive this incredible award. And congrats to all those who will be honored in the coming months. Eligible creators will receive an invitation to redeem their statue later this summer.

Over the coming months, we’ll share more about today’s announcements, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please continue to share your feedback via UserVoice.

See you in Chat!

Dan Clancy, Twitch CEO