TwitchCon is in full swing in San Francisco, and Twitch announced a lot of news Friday. Emmett Shear, co-founder of Twitch, announced on stage an improved HTML5 video player, ability to upload your own videos to Twitch, a full-featured PS4 app, and Whisper 2.0. The updates are a first for the company, which has focused on Live/archived gameplay. Now gaming celebrities can stream live on Twitch, and upload any videos they want after they’ve edited and voiced over. According to the press release, that’s coming in 2016.
The updated Twitch app is rolling out to PS3, PS4, and Vita. PS4 users have been able to share gameplay to Twitch through the built-in share feature. However, users haven’t been able to enjoy the same features as the desktop or mobile app. The Playstation app mimics the same features as the web, but is long overdue considering platforms like Xbox One, iOS and Android app, and even Roku have a fully featured Twitch app.
Coming soon: Upload videos directly to Twitch and create a true 24/7 channel experience. #TwitchConKeynote pic.twitter.com/MHDuZgmohd
— Official TwitchCon (@TwitchConSF) September 25, 2015
The improved HTML5 player will begin rolling out next year, but select users already have the new player. It’s all apart of speeding up Twitch, to compete with YouTube’s HTML5 player which lets users play 4k video at 60FPS. The company is also helping Adobe Flash die is slow death. The update also updates Whisper which is the streaming service chat app.
“Whispers now live in their own individual docked windows alongside a comprehensive list of all your whisper conversations. And it gets better. Whisper conversation history will be saved forever. Stop and start your whisper conversations whenever you please.”
The updates are all rolling out sometime next year, and should help Twitch compete with YouTube Gaming. The features aren’t revolutionary, nor new ideas. Twitch is shifting how they’re looking at the gaming community, through better community communications and videos like let’s plays and other uploaded videos. Twitch is going try desperately to keep their market share, and popular personalities like PewDiePie from switching over to YouTube Gaming for streaming and gaming uploads.
Tell us what you think about the news from TwitCon in the comments down below!