Ban Sharing, Freeform Tags, and Gifted Memberships for All
With how busy a week it was for Twitch News and next week being Twitchcon Amsterdam, I consider myself fortunate that THIS WEEK Twitch is on a company-wide holiday. But that's time I can spend creating YouTube and Tiktok content or working on TOS.gg Premium Content! But, for now, let's get into the news.
Twitch News
Twitch hosted their monthly Patch Notes show last week and revealed a few things they have been working on. Granted, plenty of it is things I've already covered - but now it's all official (and includes rough release timeframes). For starters, Twitch is coming out with Freeform Tags in the next couple of months - a way for streamers to create any tags they want to identify their content. There will be moderation and machine learning to avoid any abuse of those tags. They're also increasing the number of tags from 5 to 10.
They also confirmed that Guest Star (June 9) would enable creators to bring other streamers and community members to their stream. The host can invite up to 5 others, each with their own audio line and video feed. Moderation tools are built into the tool. There's even a backend 'green room' before you bring people on live. If you want to see the entire presentation, here it is. We won't know how it fully functions until it's released, but it sounds feature-rich. This is Twitch's most significant product launch in a while, so there was a LOT of company activity, including a media campaign to announce it. I'll dive deeper into my thoughts about it in a YouTube video this week! Guest Star gets a hand-selected beta this summer, with a broader beta in the Fall.
Twitch will be launching a "Shared Ban" functionality at some point in the future, enabling you to directly share your bans list with another channel.#TwitchNews pic.twitter.com/jr5zq5ioEH
— Zach Bussey (@zachbussey) June 30, 2022
While not officially announced, Twitch also showed off a new set of moderation titles. In addition to being able to mark someone as a Serial Harasser, Twitch also appears to be launching Shared Ban functionality. More details soon, but no timeline for release yet.
That's all the big Twitch stories from the week, but there's plenty more below that you'll get access to by joining free!