Twitch has published an open letter from CEO Dan Clancy highlighting the plans the streaming platform has for the upcoming year. “This letter gives an early peek at some of the things we are doing in 2024 to help improve the service to better meet your needs,” Clancy wrote. Those plans include updates to its mobile platform, its collaboration tools, its sponsorship partners, and more. You can read all about them here, and Clancy is planning a livestream today at 3:30PM ET to talk more about the open letter.
Though the letter made no concrete announcements of what kinds of products will come or when, in an interview with The Verge, Jeremy Forrester, Twitch’s vice president of community product, talks about Twitch’s broader strategy for 2024. He says that Twitch aimed to invest and expand in three key areas: sharing content on other platforms, enabling collaboration between streamers, and improving Twitch’s mobile experience.
Last year, Twitch created the Clip Editor which allowed users to take clips, orient them from landscape to portrait, and export them to YouTube and later TikTok.
“We want to bring that same functionality to mobile,” Forrester says, “as well as adding more social platforms to share clips to Instagram.”
When asked if X was one of the platforms in consideration for these expansions, Forrester says, “Right now we’re really focused on short-form video platforms,” explaining that it requires much more effort for streamers to share content on “video-forward services’’ like Instagram than on places like X or Reddit.
Another area of focus is streamer collaboration. In the open letter, Clancy wrote that Twitch was working on improvements to the Stream Together product, adding features like merging collaborators’ chats, making it easier to set up and to find streamers to collaborate with.
Finally, the mobile experience will be getting some updates as well. The open letter said that Twitch’s plans for mobile include adding previously desktop-only moderation tools; changing how viewers can purchase subscriptions, bits, and gifts; and generally improving the mobile app experience.
Forrester says that he is most excited about the mobile updates, explaining that over half of Twitch’s daily viewers are on mobile. “There’s a lot of opportunity, both for creatives and for Twitch, if we can make the [mobile] feed a really successful, fun, and unique way to discover live content.”
Twitch is unique in that it is a platform focused on live content. “Live discovery is different and difficult,” Forrester says. Unlike a video that can passively circulate on a platform before suddenly going viral, Forrester explains that with live content, it’s difficult to reproduce the same kinds of virality that can rocket a content creator to stardom.
“When something really exciting is happening, it’s very hard to get everyone there at that moment.”
As a result, growth for streamers is slow. “You don’t get these overnight sensations as much as you do on other platforms where one piece of content can bring you a whole bunch of new followers and a new reach for your platform.”
Reaching new audiences, either on Twitch or elsewhere, Forrester says, is one of the biggest underlying challenges for Twitch streamers, and that all the initiatives announced in the letter will make it easier for creators to find and build their communities.
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