in an open letter published On Wednesday, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy outlined the live streaming company’s plans for 2024, with a focus on helping streamers grow their audiences even when they’re not live.
This year, Twitch plans to revamp its app for the first time in five years, ditching its old design to focus on a scrollable feed that looks like TikTok and allows viewers to jump around. between bite-sized chunks of content to discover new streamers. The company has not set a date for the launch of the redesigned app, but the move shows that Twitch is prioritizing changes to make both its business and its community of streamers more sustainable in the long term.
“People can’t be live all the time, right? That’s why we want to provide tools to creators to help them continue to engage with their community while they’re offline,” Jeremy Forrester, vice president of community products at Twitch, told TechCrunch in an interview.
Twitch has had a difficult year. Emmett Shear, one of the original founders of Justin.tv, the variety live streaming service that would become Twitch, stepped down as the company’s CEO a year ago. Since then, Twitch has suffered rounds of deep layoffs, Cut 500 employees (another 35% of their workforce) last month. At the end of last year the company announced that withdraw from south korea, a major esports market, citing the “prohibitively expensive” cost of running an online business there. In 2023, Twitch also fought against community-wide controversies following updates to its revenue division and brand content ruleswhich in both cases the company withdrew after a violent reaction from streamers.
Given the layoffs and broader uncertainty about its business, 2024 is a make or break year for Twitch. The company needs to tighten things up while also reassuring the streamers who power the platform that Twitch is the right place to invest their time and energy.
Beyond being live
Live streaming has long been Twitch’s bread and butter, but in the last year the platform has become more open to ways of packaging its content that don’t require streamers and viewers to be online at the same time. .
One year ago, Twitch launched a tool That helped streamers easily export video clips to apps like YouTube and TikTok, and there will soon be plans to export directly to Instagram. Those additions show that Twitch knows it needs a symbiotic rather than purely competitive relationship with other social networks to increase visibility and make it easier for creators just starting out to build an audience.
“We want to dramatically increase the amount of content that is exported from Twitch to other social networks,” Forrester said. “So the goal really is for a lot more people to watch more Twitch content every time they’re on Instagram, every time they’re on TikTok, every time they’re on YouTube Shorts.
“…Live content is very different from offline content, and offline content has a somewhat easier ability to go viral. In general, it’s easier to get massive improvements in content offline than live. And that’s one of the benefits of including more content on other services… you have the opportunity to be exposed to more people and more opportunities to be seen by a lot of people and bring them back to your community.”
Stream Together, the co-streaming product formerly known as guest star, is another gesture toward improving discovery. Twitch says it plans to bring improvements to Stream Together to streamline the setup process and create a way for streamers to “spontaneously” discover other streamers to collaborate with on the platform, rather than relying on them to have an existing peer-to-peer community. the one to resort to. It may be a risky proposition (a lot can go wrong when you’re live), but it shows that Twitch knows it needs all the force multipliers it can get to drive viewers to channels beyond its most followed superstars.
Twitch also introduced its own version of Snapchat or Instagram-like Stories. in the app last year. The feature sits on top of the current layout and highlights ephemeral posts from channels your users follow. Twitch Stories will soon add some basic quality-of-life improvements, such as allowing streamers to create and upload original short videos, adding pinch-to-zoom on photos, and making it possible to share vertical streaming clips.
“The purpose is how we allow creators to interact with their community when they’re not live,” Forrester said. “How do we allow creators to take a break, but still be able to connect with their fans and watchers and hopefully bring them back to future live streams?”
Due to its long viewing sessions and the fact that streamers rely on powerful PCs (and, perhaps even more essentially, RGB ambient lighting), Twitch has historically focused more on its desktop experience than its mobile app. But the company wants to make those experiences more equal, even for the moderators who keep many of its popular communities running. In the open letter, Clancy acknowledged that the lack of mobile modding tools was “a real limitation” to keeping communities safe and that the company will introduce a mobile modding view for iOS so mods can do their thing on the go. .
Twitch’s growing pains
Most social media platforms focus on punchy, seconds-long videos or short, punchy lines of text, but Twitch has always been a different beast. The content on Twitch is extremely extensive and streamers regularly stream games or just chatting for many hours per session. Viewers who follow streamers on Twitch are glued to these long sessions, but the long-form approach has some inherent challenges that the company will face in 2024.
For one thing, all that live streaming infrastructure for multi-hour sessions is very expensive, even under Amazon’s wing. And given the magnitude of recent layoffs, Twitch’s parent company doesn’t seem willing to let its live streaming business lose money forever. Another problem is that each six-hour streaming session is driven by a streamer, an individual person who Twitch needs to properly incentivize to keep streaming for long hours without burning out.
Unfortunately for Twitch, there are many compelling alternatives to streaming one’s life for hours, particularly in the form of Youtube. YouTube has its own live streaming service, YouTube Gaming, but it is much better known for its creator-friendly economy and the treasure trove of asynchronous videos that can be discovered through its ingenious recommendation engine.
For now, Twitch’s plan is to cultivate products that complement the long live sessions the platform is known for, ideally giving streamers a little more breathing room in the process.
“We are very aware of the number of hours it takes to be successful on the platform and we do not intend to ever increase that,” Forrester told TechCrunch. “But hopefully, over time, I’d love to be able to prove that you can be successful by investing fewer hours in the live part of your job.”
“I think the proof is in the pudding: if we can get streamers to be able to grow and monetize more efficiently, I’m hopeful and optimistic, that opens the door for streamers to say, ‘Oh, me.’ I’m going to take more time off, I’m going to spend more time doing other things. [and] invest in other aspects of my career,’ which I hope will pay off in the long term.”