Twitch, the gaming-centric streaming community, introduced new video tools for its creators yesterday.
Twitch Video Producer makes pre-recorded videos as easy to create as Twitch’s live streams. The update also seems to be designed to discourage creators from uploading low-quality videos.
Twitch product manager Justin Oh posted the Video Producer announcement on the company’s blog:
“Video Producer is a set of tools that enables creators to bring the exciting community experiences Twitch is known for to produced videos.”
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One of the most important aspects of Video Producer is the mandatory Premiere feature. Premieres are essentially landing pages for newly uploaded videos. The new landing pages allow creators to chat with their audience and send out invitations.
“We want every new video to get an exciting debut,” Oh explained, “which is why setting up a Premiere is a part of the new video publishing flow.”
Built-in Quality Controls
In addition to helping creators build hype for new videos, the new Premiere feature also prevents creators from spamming Twitch with low-quality content.
Twitch has set their newly retooled system up so that Premieres and Live streams cannot happen at the same time.
According to Twitch’s announcement, all new videos must be Premiered. In other words, there’s no way to upload a video to Twitch without setting up a Premiere landing page for it first.
Another limitation: Twitch creators can’t start a live stream while a Premiere is running. Likewise, a scheduled Premiere will fail if creators are live streaming when it debuts. Failed Premieres have to be rescheduled to appear on Twitch.
Twitch apparently hopes the Video Producer tools will act as a quality filter to improve content across the board. Better, more engaging content means more money for Twitch, more money for its creators and a better experience for Twitch viewers.
Chris Casper is a former tech industry product manager who escaped from California for New Mexico. Now he writes about science and tech while searching for the perfect green chile sauce.
