On Friday TwitchCon San Diego 2024 will kick off the ultimate IRL event celebrating the Twitch community with a packed weekend filled with meet & greet sessions, live music, interactive panels, speedrunning events and more. During the Opening Ceremony keynote, CEO Dan Clancy will share news about the product roadmap including updates coming to Clips, plans for the Twitch mobile application, details on Shared Chat, and changes to Twitch’s enforcement system. And for the first time ever, the keynote will be streamed in 2K!
The announcements this weekend are part of the continued work outlined in this year’s open letter with a focus on making it easier for streamers to create fun and engaging content while reaching new viewers and building a supportive community.
- New Ways to Earn
- We’re investing in more features that combine engagement and fun mechanics to drive communal support, like Hype Train and Power-ups. We’re working on a new feature that will allow viewers to react to a moment on stream with an emotion or a sentiment like a laugh or a heart, and rally the rest of the community to join in the fun with just a single tap.
- Similar to Hype Train, every contribution, big or small, will keep the momentum going, and the celebration growing. Whether viewers tap one time or send 100 reactions at once, viewers will have the opportunity to influence the stream and create memorable moments with the communities they love.
- This feature has been designed with mobile in mind to make it easier for people to support their favorite streamers when they’re viewing on the go and it also works on desktop. We’re actively working on getting this into the hands of the community and look forward to sharing more information later this year.
- Updates to the Mobile Experience
- With over 70% of our new viewers coming to Twitch first on the mobile app, it’s crucial that we continue to evolve the app to meet the needs of today’s viewers and streamers.
- One of the most important ways we can help streamers grow is by helping new viewers find content quickly. Since launching the new app, we’ve seen the number of video plays increase by over 60% on iOS and over double on Android. The number of follows has increased by 8% with 38M new follows being created from the feed.
- In the following months, we’ll be adding thumbnails to followed channels, easy access to followed categories, filter options, and the ability to resume watching VODs from recently watched streams.
- Making Clips Easier to Create and Manage
- We want to continue to make Clips easier to create and share so streamers can showcase their best moments. Over the next few months, we’ll roll out several updates to make managing and sharing Clips even easier including adding the ability to create portrait clips on mobile, adding additional viewer export options, and adding the option to search and filter Clips by title, creator, or date.
- We’ll also launch a Clip Carousel which will highlight the best clips from a streamer’s most recent stream allowing them to quickly swipe through them and share to social media.
- Enhanced Broadcasting Makes 4K Streaming Possible
- Last year we partnered with NVIDIA and OBS to launch enhanced broadcasting, giving streamers more control over their video quality via client-side encoding and automatic system configuration.
- We’re excited to share two new benefits of Enhanced Broadcasting that we expect to make available first thing next year. Streamers who opt in to using enhanced broadcasting will have exclusive access to 1440p viewing and the ability to stream in mixed composition – streaming in both portrait and landscape video simultaneously so viewers have an optimal viewing experience no matter what kind of device they’re watching from.
- Bringing Communities Together with Shared Chat
- Shared Chat gives creators the ability to pull their communities together into a shared live stream experience via Chat.
- Streamers can tell at a glance which messages came from their community, mods will be able to moderate all messages in chat and will be able to issue timeouts and bans during the Shared Chat session. Users that are banned from any channel in the collaboration cannot send messages during the session.
- Streamers can leave a Shared Chat session whenever they want and can Stream Together without Shared Chat, too. Shared Chat using Stream Together will be available to everyone next week.
- Updates to Strikes and Enforcements
- First, we’ll be giving streamers more clarity on violations. Starting with Chat, we’ll share the excerpt of Chat where the violation occurred in the email streamers receive and in the appeals portal. Next, we’ll be providing a clip to review the violation that happened during a livestream or VOD. We want to give streamers this information so that they can see what they did, what policies were violated, and if they feel our decision was incorrect, they can appeal.
- We’re also taking a new approach to strikes. Currently, strikes last forever and there is confusion about how Partners and non-Partners are treated. We’ve seen that permanent strikes can be a big problem for streamers who have been streaming a long time as they could be banned for a small infraction. Given this, early next year we’ll begin expiring strikes over time depending on the severity of the violation.
- These changes seek to improve clarity about our enforcements and reduce the risk that streamers lose their livelihood for low severity infractions. To be clear, we will continue to issue suspensions, including indefinite suspensions for high severity infractions.
TwitchCon will be bigger and better than ever in 2025 with the return of Rivals showdowns, leveled-up lounges, exclusive merch, live music, and more. Twitch will kick things off in Rotterdam from May 31 – June 1 and will return to San Diego from October 17 – 19.
If you’re looking forward to next year’s TwitchCon events, you can learn more here and if you want to stay up to date with the latest announcements, including ticket sales, you can sign up here.