After years of complaints from its creators about the paucity of growth opportunities for smaller streamers, Twitch is launching a Discovery Feed.
During the opening ceremony of TwitchCon Paris over the weekend, the company announced the Discovery Feed and a host of other new features. Although live streaming is the platform’s bread and butter, most creators rely on promoting their content on YouTube Shorts and TikTok to attract viewers to their Twitch channel.
The Discovery Feed will be a vertically scrollable feed in the Twitch app that, similar to TikTok, serves users non-live clips from creators’ broadcasts. Twitch has made it plain that, unlike TikTok and other short-form video platforms, it does not prioritize bite-sized content over streaming.
Because Twitch is all about live, interactive channels, it is not the company’s intention for viewers to spend hours in a Clips feed, according to a company blog post. “Our investment in Clips is designed to help viewers discover your channel so that they can join you and your community when you stream.”
Twitch stated that the Discover Feed will launch in the autumn, and until then, the company will test its algorithms using “limited versions” of the feature.
The shift toward short-form video includes new editing features that will enable creators to edit clips from their broadcasts natively into a vertical format. Twitch now supports direct exports to YouTube, and beginning in August, users will be able to export footage directly to TikTok. The clip editor will also be mobile-friendly.
Sharing content with “minimal effort” is a “win for all streamers,” according to Twitch.
And in October, like virtually every other major social platform, Twitch will launch stories. Stories will appear on the following page of the Twitch mobile app, and creators will have the option to make their stories available to the public or only to paying subscribers. Stories must comply with Twitch’s Community Guidelines and will be moderated using “text and image scanning technology.”
“The story format is well understood—ephemeral clips, pictures, text updates, and polls,” explained Twitch. “What’s exciting about Twitch stories is your ability to reach all of your Twitch followers or share with subscribers only.”
Additionally, the company is altering its approach to advertisement pauses, which have been a source of contention between the platform and its users. Despite the fact that streamers have been able to view countdown timers for ad breaks, many have complained that advertisements interrupt their content without sufficient warning.
Beginning this month, streamers will be able to enable a chat countdown timer to better anticipate commercial breaks. The countdown timer allows streamers to “snooze or pull ahead” and gives them the opportunity to “make the right calls” for the community.
Under Guest Star, the feature that enables collaboration between streamers, creators will be able to invite visitors onto their channels and stream concurrently.
The “streaming together” feature, which will begin rolling out for a “select number of channels” in August, enables up to five creators to simultaneously broadcast on their respective channels.
In the coming months, the feature will be accessible to everyone, regardless of partner or affiliate status, giving broadcasters of all levels the opportunity to increase engagement.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy stated during the TwitchCon Paris opening ceremony, “Twitch, as it existed five years ago, would not be able to support our community today, and the Twitch of today will not meet the needs of the Twitch community in five years.” “So we need to keep building.”
