TwitchCon: Snapchat, Squad Streams and more coming soon for Twitch

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear set the tone for the 4th annual TwitchCon, summing up his speech in one sentence. "Today, you will hear me say community 46 times."

Twitch is not just a live video distribution service, it's a social platform – and that's nothing without a strong and dedicated community.

"We're not just here for the show," Shear added. "We are the show."

This is part of Twitch's ability to compete with other live streaming platforms – and TwitchCon 2018 has launched new tools and updates to give Twitch's streamers more ways to interact with their community and other content creators.

Here's all that Twitch has just announced at the TwitchCon 2018.

Squad Stream

Twitch streamers who regularly play games like Fortnite, PUBG or Destiny 2 together have a unique problem: they are all broadcast at the same time, but their content is divided into several streams. Viewers never have the whole show.

With Squad Stream, Twitch hopes to change that: starting this year, Streamers will be able to "group" and simultaneously share their four shows in one viewer. Viewers will be able to seamlessly switch between channels and track the chat regardless of which stream they have selected as the main view.

Not only does this solve the problem of fragmenting viewers between streams, but it is also designed to help develop each content audience. Squad Stream will be tested with streamers selected later this year.

Even if The number of Snapchat users continues to decline, their use of filters has become a hallmark of online communication in recent yearse company launched Snap Cam today, an application that brings all these filters to the webcam of your computer. Not only is it a fun idea, but it was announced at TwitchCon.

With a custom Twitch extension, Streamers will be able to embed Snapchat lenses into their feeds. Filters can also be changed depending on what happens during the flow. Get a new subscriber? You can set the filter to celebrate with a rain of Twitch bits or to explode your face with a purple Super Saiyan lens. These, by the way, are part of a small library of custom filters specifically designed for Twitch. If viewers, like filters used by broadcasters, can try them themselves by scanning a QR code on the screen.

Twitch Sings – a video game designed for streaming

The community may be essential to Twitch's DNA, but most video games are designed to be played and not viewed. Twitch Sings hopes to change that – the social networking platform is associated with Harmonix to create a new karaoke game designed for live streaming.

Twitch Sings is not really a virtual karaoke bar – viewers can not step onto the stage and sing on the flow of the animator – but this will offer the audience a multitude of ways to interact with talent. It's not enough to ask for songs: chatting users will be able to hide the singer's lyrics or challenge such as "sing like a vampire". The multiplayer elements of the game seem mostly asynchronous, but the announcement of the game says that it will also be possible to sing in duet with the community.

An updated highlights editor

The Twitch Highlighter Editor has always allowed streamers to capture the best moments of a stream and extract them into an insulated and shareable clip. The only problem was that he could shoot only one moment in one clip at a time. Starting in January, the editor will be updated with tools allowing the streamers to gather several moments of a feed into a short clip and of exceptional quality.

Community Management Tools Updated

If you've ever seen a Twitch discussion, you know it can be a hectic place filled with offensive messages to varying degrees. This is why moderators are important. At TwitchCon, Shear has announced a suite of new tools that will make it easier for moderators to control the community.

Starting in January, mods will be able to click on the user names and see how long this person is on Twitch, how many messages they have sent and how many bans and waiting times have been applied. These profiles will also have a small mods-only community tab that will allow them to leave comments to other moderators on the user's behavior, which will allow them to call the troublemakers in advance.

Twitch will also present VIP badges to allow streamers to recognize members of the community without making them a moderator. The creators will have 10 badges to start (after reaching 50 subscribers and 5 unique chatters in one stream) and can have up to 100 to distribute to their viewers.

Other minor changes are also coming, including a new role manager page to keep track of mods and VIP users, as well as a change to the subscription badges to display the number total of month subscribers to a channel, rather than the number of months. they were subscribed sequentially.

More extensions

Finally, Twitch announced its partnership with other companies to bring even more extensions to the platform, including Snapchat (mentioned above), as well as Adobe, Tiltify, and Spotify. of course, Amazon.

You can read more about Twitch's upcoming changes on their company's blog here.