\n<\/p>\n
In an open<\/span> letter published<\/a> on Wednesday, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy outlined the livestreaming company\u2019s plans for 2024, with a focus on helping streamers grow their audiences even when they aren\u2019t live.<\/p>\n This year, Twitch plans to overhaul its app for the first time in five years, ditching its longstanding design to focus on a scrollable feed that takes after TikTok and lets viewers hop between bite-sized bits of content<\/a> to discover new streamers. The company hasn\u2019t named 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 streamer community more sustainable for the long haul.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople can\u2019t be live all the time, right? So we want to give tools to creators, to help them continue to engage their community while they\u2019re offline,\u201d Twitch VP of Community Product, Jeremy Forrester told TechCrunch in an interview.<\/p>\n Twitch has had a rocky year. Emmett Shear, one of the original founders of Justin.tv, the variety livestreaming service that would grow into Twitch, stepped down from his role as the company\u2019s CEO a year ago. In the time since, Twitch has undergone rounds of deep layoffs<\/a>, cutting 500 employees<\/a> \u2014 another 35% of its workforce \u2014 last month. Late last year the company announced that it would pull out of South Korea<\/a>, a major esports market, citing the \u201cprohibitively expensive\u201d cost of running an online business there. In 2023, Twitch also wrestled with community-wide controversies<\/a> following updates to its revenue split and branded content rules<\/a>, which in both instances the company walked back after a backlash from streamers.<\/p>\n 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 reassuring the streamers that make the platform tick that Twitch is the right place to invest their time and energy.<\/p>\n Livestreaming has long been Twitch\u2019s bread and butter, but in the past year the platform has been more open to ways of packaging its content that don\u2019t require streamers and viewers to be online at the same time.<\/p>\n A year ago, Twitch released a tool<\/a> that helped streamers easily export video clips to apps like YouTube and TikTok, with plans to export directly to Instagram on the way soon. Those additions show that Twitch knows that it needs a symbiotic rather than purely competitive relationship with other social networks to boost discoverability and make it easier for creators just getting started to build an audience.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to drastically increase the amount of content that\u2019s exported from Twitch into other social networks,\u201d Forrester said. \u201cSo the goal really is like, a lot more people seeing more Twitch content every time they\u2019re in Instagram, every time they\u2019re in TikTok, every time they\u2019re in YouTube Shorts.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 Live content is very different from offline content, and offline content has a somewhat easier ability to go viral. In general it\u2019s easier to get massive boosts on offline content than it is on live. And that\u2019s one of the benefits of getting more content onto other services\u2026 you have an opportunity to be exposed to more people and more opportunities to get seen by many people and bring them back to your community.\u201d<\/p>\n Stream Together, the co-streaming product previously known as Guest Star<\/a>, is another gesture toward improving discovery. Twitch says that it plans to bring improvements to Stream Together to streamline the setup process and build a way for streamers to \u201cspontaneously\u201d discover other streamers to collaborate with on the platform, rather than counting on them having an existing community of peers to tap. That might be a risky proposition (a lot can go wrong when you\u2019re live) but it shows that Twitch knows it needs all of the force multipliers it can get to drive viewers to channels beyond its well-followed superstars.<\/p>\n Twitch also introduced its own version of a Snapchat or Instagram-like Stories into the app last year<\/a>. The feature sits at the top of the current design and highlights ephemeral posts from channels its users follow. Twitch\u2019s Stories will soon add some basic quality of life improvements, like letting streamers create and upload original short videos, adding pinch-to-zoom for photos and making it possible to share vertical stream clips.<\/p>\n \u201cThe purpose is how do we allow creators to engage with their community when they\u2019re not live,\u201d Forrester said. \u201cHow do we allow creators to take a break, but still be able to connect with their fans and their watchers and hopefully bring them back to future live streams.\u201d<\/p>\n Because of its long viewing sessions and the fact that streamers rely on beefy PCs (and, perhaps even more essentially, ambient RGB lighting), Twitch historically has focused more on its desktop experience than its mobile app. But the company wants to make those experiences more equal, including for the moderators who keep many of its popular communities humming along. In the open letter, Clancy acknowledged that the lack of mobile tools for mods was \u201ca real limitation\u201d for keeping communities safe and that the company will introduce a mobile mod view for iOS so mods can do their thing on the go.<\/p>\n Most social media platforms focus on punchy, seconds-long videos or short, grabby lines of text, but Twitch has always been a different beast. Content on Twitch is extremely long form, with streamers regularly broadcasting gameplay or just chatting<\/em><\/a> for many hours per session. Viewers who follow streamers on Twitch are glued to these lengthy sessions, but the long form approach does have some inherent challenges, which the company is grappling with in 2024.<\/p>\n For one, all of that livestreaming infrastructure for many hour long sessions is very expensive, even under Amazon\u2019s wing. And given the depth of recent layoffs, Twitch\u2019s parent company doesn\u2019t seem willing to let its livestreaming business lose money forever. Another problem is that every six hour streaming session is powered by a streamer \u2014 an individual person that Twitch needs to adequately incentivize to keep broadcasting for long hours without having them burn out.<\/p>\n Unfortunately for Twitch, many compelling alternatives to broadcasting one\u2019s life for hours on end exist, particularly in the form of YouTube<\/a>. YouTube has its own livestreaming service, YouTube Gaming, but is much better known for its creator-friendly economics<\/a> and the trove of asynchronous videos discoverable through its keen recommendation engine.<\/p>\n For now, Twitch\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are very mindful about the amount of hours it takes to be successful on the platform and we are not looking to ever increase that,\u201d Forrester told TechCrunch. \u201cBut hopefully over time, I would love to be able to show that you can be as successful investing less hours in the live portion of your work.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think the proof is kind of in the pudding: If we can make it so the streamers can more efficiently grow, more efficiently monetize, I\u2019m hopeful and optimistic that opens the door for streamers to be like, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m going to take more time off, I\u2019m gonna spend more time doing other things [and] invest in other aspects of my career,\u2019 which hopefully will pay off in the long run.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nBeyond going live<\/h3>\n
Twitch\u2019s growing pains<\/h3>\n