In January of this year, the Twitch blog published an open letter from Chief Product Officer Tom Verrilli and Chief Monetization Officer Mike Minton. They shared information about the Twitch innovations that expect streamers in 2023! So here's a brief overview...
As this letter makes clear, in 2023 main goal will be to grow communities and revenues. Products and tools will be launched to make it easier for the channels to generate revenue. And also for greater efficiency, they will add new features that will help streamers interact more with the community.
New tools and features
First-party tools have been announced to help celebrate viewers. This will improve deeper interaction with the community. One of the innovations will be Sound Bites. These are first-party sound alerts that allow viewers to pay to interact with and support their favorite streamers. Now Twitch is developing a Q&A tool to allow you to take prompts from their audience. And the Viewer Milestones will help recognize viewers for hitting some achievements during the broadcast.
It will also make it easier for streamers to recognize and connect with the community on-air and off-air thanks to the messaging product. Now the streamer will be able to send videos and clips to followers and subscribers, even when he is offline.
Twitch will make useful tools for sponsorship, channel skins, and clickable branded graphics. These allow streamers to place brand assets onto streams above chat or elsewhere on the channel page. For the creator, it will be easier to flag their community when working with advertisers on branded content.
There will be tools to make it easier for streamers to promote their broadcast on Twitch and other platforms. Namely, they will help creators edit and export clips for vertical short-form video formats.
Especially for viewers, Twitch Turbo will be improved, which allows you to watch the ads-free broadcast, and get chat upgrades to emotes and badges.
Many tools have also been announced to help viewers discover content from any streamer, and emotes can now be used in Stream titles. Viewers will discover easier new content with customizable tags. The streamer will be able to describe his stream as he wants. And the additional backend infrastructure will allow you to collect streams related to the same topic and they can be identified.
Twitch will add support for multiple browsers (Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari) and more granular audio tooling for streamers to control their guest’s audio.
The ad running experience will be improved. Changes to the Ads Manager will help streamers have more visibility and control over when the ads roll.
Ads showing up on Twitch will improve and be more convenient for viewers and channels with an update to disable pre-rolls works for channels. Now it will not be necessary to make split into 90-second ads every 30 minutes. Plus, a Picture-by-Picture experience will be applied for pre-rolls that viewers do see.
Streamers will now have access to data on how to improve streaming content with analytics updates. For example, tag impression analytics, best days and times for streaming in various games and categories, and audience retention data.
For mobile devices, a new discovery feature will be added, so viewers can continuously scroll through the feed of recommended channels and clips.
And for Affiliates and Partners, the Creator's Home panel will become available. This is a personalized, dynamic ‘home base’ that includes relevant tips and actionable recommendations to grow the streamer's channel.
In conclusion
Of course, this is not a complete list of Twitch innovations. I think that during the year we will learn about other new products introduced on this platform. The main thing is that new tools or features are created to make it easier for people to create communities of their interests. Therefore, Twitch regularly studies the feedback of its users, strengthens feedback, and publishes information about updates. And in 2023, Twitch is launching an experiments help page...
