Twitch has been consistently growing and dominant within livestreaming as a scene, and it’s easy to see why. The ease of both viewing and broadcasting gives Twitch an easy in to the free time of millions of gamers. Now, with the launch of a new software tool, it looks like the broadcasting side of things is about to get even easier.
The new software tool called Twitch Studio features a variety of helpful functions. Streamers will be able to easily manage chat moderating and viewing as well as setting up stream scenes, like webcam locations. This cuts out a fair bit of the minutiae of dealing with setting up your streams.
Twitch Studio looks to be targeted almost entirely to newer streamers. As newer Twitch users often have less complex broadcast scenes and audio/visual setups, it seems like a simple UI is a great choice. New streamers should be able to hop right in and start tinkering with things, hopefully directly improving the quality and engagement with their streams.
“We don’t want to throw an hour of setup at you,” said Cheng Cheng, director of product management for the creator experience at Twitch, to The Verge. “We want you to just actually get started and start to enjoy what you’re passionate about.”
It’s pretty simple to see why Twitch is doing this, and it’s all about the money. The company needs more users coming in at a continual rate to keep the lights on, but keeping users watching for longer periods will help shore up the overall process of keeping Twitch at the top of the mountain.
This new suite of software will allow Twitch to further control the ecosystem around their dominant platform, for good or bad. The Twitch software must directly compete with free software alternatives like OBS to gain ground, but given the amount of features and the support Twitch can levy to keep the thing updated, and the simpler feature sets, I don’t see that being a problem.
You can sign up for the Twitch Studio beta by heading to its official page.
