Twitch announces group streaming and a karaoke game for its 1M concurrent viewers

The teens were out in force today in San Jose for the annual TwitchCon game streaming conference. There, Twitch announced that at any given time, 1 million people are watching it (up from 746,000 last year), and it seemed like that many game lovers were at TwitchCon in person to meet some of the half-million web celebs that broadcast each day on the service. Considering Twitch said just 2 million were broadcasting per month last year, the service’s growth is still explosive under Amazon’s ownership.

Amongst the major reveals at TwitchCon were a new Squad Streaming feature that lets up to four people broadcast at once in split-screen that will test with select streamers later this year, and a Twitch Sings game that broadcasters can play to perform karaoke (though only with fake versions of songs since Twitch lacks major label music licenses). Broadcasters can sign up here for the Twitch Sings closed beta that starts later in 2018.

Twitch Squad Streaming

And Twitch broadcasters can now use Snapchat’s augmented reality lenses thanks to the new Snap Camera desktop app and accompanying Twitch extension launching today. Streamers can use hotkeys to trigger different Snapchat Lenses, let viewers try those masks by scanning an onscreen Snapchat QR code, and reward subscribers with a bonus thank you effect. Read our full story on Snap Camera here:
There were plenty of other minor announcements during the conference’s keynote:

• Over 235,00 streamers now have Affiliate status and are earning money on their channels while 6,800 have joined its Partnership program so they can earn even more through channel subscriptions and ads.
• Twitch’s Highlight editor can now stich together multiple clips from across a broadcasting session
• New homepage sections will feature up-and-coming streamers, new Partners and Affiliates, or streamers local to viewers
• VIP Badges will let creators recognize their favorite subscribers and moderators
• Moderators can now see how long someone has been on Twitch, view chat messages that person has sent in the channel, and see how many timeouts or bans that account has received in that channel to better understand who to boot
• 18 billion messages have been sent in Twitch chat and its Whispers feature in 2018, and fans have give creators 85 million Cheers and Subscriptions
• 150 million Twitch Clips have been created in 2018 to bring the best game stream and other weird content to the rest of the web.
• Twitch users have gifted $9 million worth of subscriptions to fellow users in just 9 weeks.

Source: TechCrunch
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