Remember the days when YouTube was mainly for pre-recorded videos and Twitch was all about live-streaming? The boundaries between Google and Amazon’s video services continue to blur.

YouTube has been beefing up its live-streaming features over the last couple of years and now Twitch is making a significant move in to pre-recorded content.

Blurred lines

The service has launched a set of tools called Video Producer which it hopes “enables creators to bring the exciting community experiences Twitch is known for to produced videos”.

Features include the ability to produce videos offline, then set them to go live at a certain time on Twitch for a “premiere” so that fans can gather to watch and chat together.

Twitch creators will also be able to trigger “reruns” of their archived live-streams: “so they can relive their best moments, show off a video to new viewers for the first time, or just replay videos whenever they feel like it”.

Twitch says that many of its monetisation options, including subs and bits, will work with content uploaded through Video Producer.

Thus, one key point here is that it could significantly increase the earning potential for Twitch influencers: nobody can live-stream around the clock, but they could cue up reruns and premieres to up their broadcasting hours – and their revenue.