This weekend, Twitch hosted its annual event - TwitchCon - at the San Jose convention centre in Los Angeles.
The event saw a host of talks, panels, celebrity appearances and platform announcements, as well as tonnes of activities celebrating the streaming giant.
As well as revealing a host of new extensions for creators, Twitch also unveiled stream squads. This new feature allows up to four creators to broadcast the same stream across all of their channels.
This is particularly useful for creators playing multiplayer titles such as PUBG, COD and Fortnite, but it's also handy for streamer cliques and friends.
Twitch Sings
Twitch also unveiled Twitch Sings, a karaoke-style game built for live streams. Viewers can request songs, use cheers to activate light shows on stream and set streamers challenges.
The Twitch Sings game was available to play at TwitchCon this weekend and will launch into a closed beta later in the year.
The platform also announced developments for Twitch Rivals, Twitch's esports program. In 2018 the program saw 55 esports events hosted, including the Fortnite summer skirmish. These events reportedly saw an average of 20 per cent more viewers and 90 per cent more revenue from subs for participating creators. In 2019, Twitch Rivals is scheduled to host 128 events.
Chat moderation
In a bid to further control nonsense in live chat, Twitch has made some refinements to its chat moderation tools. By clicking on a name in chat, mods will be able to see information at a glance including how long that account has been on Twitch, plus how many timeouts and bans the account has accumulated.
Mods can also now leave feedback regarding users and viewers for creators and other mods, which allows a community team to make better decisions on bans, timeouts and other moderation decisions. These updates will roll out in January.
Twitch has also introduced VIP badges. These can be given out to highlight important members of a stream, including friends, fellow streamers, and developers that have dropped in to see their game.
