Amazon purchased Twitch a little while back after they were shopped around to other potential buyers. Many wondered what Amazon wanted with Twitch, and what they’d do with the game streaming service. Today, Amazon finally revealed their plans; Amazon Prime users would get Twitch Prime or just an ad-free version of Twitch. The ad-free plan cost $9.99 a month, but with Prime, you’ll get all those features for free.
https://vimeo.com/185079007
Twitch also announced a slew of other features meant to compete with YouTube Gaming.
Twitch Keynote Announcements:
- Uploads: Any user can upload videos to Twitch for anyone to watch. Streamers may also download past streams and use the footage to create and upload on demand videos for their viewers to watch whenever they want.
- Clips on mobile: Viewers on iOS and Android can create and share clips from live streams and videos directly within the Twitch app.
- Transcodes: Video quality options will begin rolling out to even more streamers so viewers with all levels of Internet speeds can view streams seamlessly. Video quality options will be automatically applied based on a channel’s expected viewership.
- Curse Voice and Twitch integration: Users of Curse Voice and Twitch may link their accounts to access all global and non-global emotes from Twitch on Curse Voice. As an added bonus, Curse Voice users will also get a Twitch-themed color customization option on the client.
- HTML5: HTML5 is now available to ALL Twitch users.
Coming in October 2016:
- Clip trimming: Allows viewers to more accurately capture the perfect moment by adjusting the start and end time of their clip.
- Loyalty subscription badges: Viewers can soon show the extent of their loyalty to a Partner and Partners will be able to reward subscribers accordingly with custom chat badges based on length of a subscription. Badge tiers for one, three, six, 12, and 24 month subscriptions will be available to Partners for design.
Amazon is sweetening the deal for getting Amazon Prime, but the more services and perks they add in the more likely Amazon will need to once again raise the price. While Prime members spend more on Amazon, they’re also using a lot of services that would normally cost double to triple the yearly cost of just one Prime subscription.
Tell us in the comments below what you think about Twitch Prime, and if you’ve activated it.