Every year at TwitchCon, we’re reminded of something this community has known all along: Twitch is about connection and the sense of belonging that comes from showing up together, day after day. While a lot has changed since the early days of streaming, what makes Twitch special hasn’t.
Today, livestreaming is bigger than ever, and our communities are shaping culture in real time. From gaming and sports to music, IRL, and entertainment, Twitch has become the new pop culture frontline.
That spirit has been on full display at TwitchCon Europe in Rotterdam. Across two packed days of content, we’re excited to celebrate what makes Twitch special, and look ahead to what’s next.
This year’s TwitchCon Europe keynote had a lot of updates — here’s what you missed:
We’re Heading to Berlin!
Mark your calendars: we’re excited to share that next year’s TwitchCon Europe will be held in Berlin on May 22-23, 2027. Join the waitlist to be first in line when tickets drop.
Our Creators Shape Culture
Twitch is increasingly where pop culture unfolds live. Over the past year, creators across the globe drove massive cultural moments, and pushed streaming into new territories.
In France, /Squeezie and 200,000 people took over Le Mans for GP Explorer, establishing a new French viewership record with 1.4 million peak concurrent viewers. /Sjokz and /Caedrel’s The League Awards in Munich showed how Twitch creators are reshaping esports. QSMP Season 2 marked the return of /Quackity’s multilingual Minecraft project, featuring 50 streamers across 10 languages, using real-time translation to help creators collaborate and tell a story together. /missmikkaa hosted Under the Northern Lights, a three-day charity stream live from Iceland, which raised over $60,000 for Save the Children —and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We’re so proud of our community. Our goal is to make it easier for you to build, create, find your people, and do great things. Here’s what we’ve been working on to help you keep doing what you do best:
An Improved Viewing Experience
Dual Format lets you stream in both horizontal and vertical formats at the same time. This means that viewers on mobile will see a full screen vertical view optimized for mobile devices, and viewers watching on a desktop will see the classic horizontal format.
When you’re viewing on mobile, you get an optimized layout when holding the phone vertically. You can switch to classic split view. And when you turn the phone from either view, you’re back in a full screen horizontal view.
We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback during the beta and made noticeable performance improvements, too. Dual Format leverages Enhanced Broadcasting technology, which uses the client to encode multiple variants of your stream to viewers. When we roll this out next month, we’ll be adding server-side transcoding support for Partners and many Affiliates, to offset the strain this can put on some systems.
Leveling Up 2K (1440p) Streaming
As part of Enhanced Broadcasting, we’re also launching 2K streaming to all Partners and Affiliates in June. Going live in 2K at 1440p resolution allows for more detailed streams, and we’ve also bumped up bitrates across the board — up to 9 Mbps for 1440p and 7.5 Mbps for 1080p — so streams look sharper and more consistent, even during fast-paced gameplay.
Improvements to Notifications
As we continue to improve the viewing experience, we’ve also been working on updates to notifications to make sure your viewers know when you’re live. You may have noticed that we added avatars to notifications to make your live ups feel more personal and help them stand out to your community, a change that significantly increased engagement and drove more viewers to your streams.
Soon, we’ll be adding new ways for you to send additional notifications while you are live. For example, if you change games, bring on a guest, or hit a Hype Train record, we’ll update your community based on these events mid-stream, to let them know what’s happening and encourage more viewers to join in on the fun.
Mid-Stream Summaries
Speaking of joining a stream in the middle, have you ever shown up at a stream and wondered what has been going on up to that point? Today, we’re announcing our new stream summary feature. Stream summaries will generate a brief synopsis of what has been happening in the stream, so you can jump right in without feeling like you missed out. We’ll continue to experiment with the information shared with viewers as we roll this out.
Upping our Investment in Clips
Live content is the heart of Twitch, but even the most dedicated community members can’t always be there for every moment. That’s why we’re continuing to invest in clips and making them easier to create, share, and discover.
By the time you receive the stream summary email at the end of your stream, we want you to be able to quickly pick out a handful of clips to provide a recap — kind of like a highlight reel — so you can easily share these clips both on and off Twitch.
Auto Clips
First, we’re making it easier to create and select great clips to share. Auto Clips automatically generates captioned clips from the best moments from your stream, by taking into account chat activity, vocal inflection, and on-screen events. “Twitch Clip That” is a great feature — if you say the phrase, we’ll automatically create a clip that is easy to share later.
Currently, only 50% of streamers have a clip to share after any given stream. But for streamers using Auto Clips, that number is up to 85%. We’ll be moving to beta in the coming months. Signups are open now, click here to join the waitlist.
Captions
Starting next week, we’ll be rolling out the ability to add captions to your community clips automatically. You’ll be able to edit the text, timing, and style of the captions on your clip so they’re optimized for viewers watching with sound off. We also are exploring other ways to enhance your clips, such auto-cropping and trimming.
More Clips in Stories
Starting in June, we’ll show you a sorted list of the best clips from your stream at the top of your stream summary — so you can quickly share the ones you like to your Twitch Stories — to create a highlight reel or recap of your stream.
We’ve found that the most valuable part of the Stories feed is when streamers post clips. So, we’re doubling down and evolving the Stories feed to make it easier for your viewers to see your clips.
By sharing clip recaps to your stories after every stream, viewers who missed you live will have an easy-to-find, curated selection of clips ready to help them catch up. They’ll be able to react to your clips, giving you strong signals about the best clips to share off Twitch to reach new viewers. And of course, one reason to share your clips is to make it easy for your viewers to keep Watch Streaks alive.
We’ll also be adding clips from your favorite streamers into your live feed, so you can get caught up on the action and get ready for the next stream.
Helping Streamers Earn More
Now let’s talk about helping streamers make more money. We’ve been exploring more ways to help communities come together and have fun — all while helping you earn more.
We introduced Power-Ups a few years ago as a way for the community to engage and interact with your stream. Viewers can use Bits to do things like Gigantify an emote, or add visual effects to their chat messages.
Recently, we launched Custom Power-Ups, which lets you develop custom rewards for your channel. We’ve seen streamers make custom power-ups to help decide which character skin to use, to guide a raid, to pet their dog, and more. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next!
Creator Badge Drops
Along these same lines, we just launched Creator Badge Drops, which gives you a new way to reward your viewers. You can design custom Chat badges that commemorate big moments from your stream — including subathons, gaming milestones, or Partnerversaries. Your viewers can then earn the badge for a limited time by hitting your unlock requirements — either watching a certain number of minutes, or gifting a certain number of subs. During testing, streamers who set up custom badges for their events saw up to 50% more gift sub revenue on their first day of the event.
Special Hype Trains
Earlier this year, we tested a Community Train where viewers who didn’t spend were still rewarded with emotes — and learned that these unique trains earn two times more than standard Hype Trains. Soon, we’ll launch the new Mythic Train, which rewards contributors with a bonus golden version of an emote — including PogChamp, CoolCat, or WhatFace — that can then be used across Twitch for 24 hours.
GIPHY in chat
We’ve heard feedback from both streamers and viewers that you want Tier 2 and Tier 3 subscriptions to feel more unique and rewarding. We’re excited to announce we’re partnering with GIPHY, and soon, higher tier subscribers will be able to add GIFs in chat. Streamers will be in control — you’ll be able to turn this feature off, decide how often GIFs can appear, and moderate which ones can appear on your channel.
Gif ‘Em All
We’ve been experimenting with a new “gift em all” sub feature that lets a user gift subscriptions to all viewers who are watching and follow the streamer — up to 1,000 gift subs at once. This feature isn’t always active, so when you see it, you have an opportunity to make magic happen. You’ll start seeing more Gift Em All pop-ups in the next few weeks.
Creator Sponsorships
Another way streamers are earning more is through Creator Sponsorships. Our goal is to bring sponsorship opportunities to streamers of all sizes. We are still in early stages, but this year, we’ve already seen three times the number of streamers participating in Creator Sponsorships compared to 2025.
Bounty Board for All
For years, you’ve asked us to expand Bounty Board campaigns to affiliates. And now, we’re doing it! Bounty Board is being integrated into Creator Sponsorships through Open Invite campaigns, available to both Partners and Affiliates.
Recently, Minecraft did a campaign with over 6,000 streamers participating, and over half of them were affiliates. More campaigns will be available for affiliates later this year.
Gameplay Ads
We recently began rolling out Twitch Gameplay Ads that can be used as part of a Creator Sponsorship. Gameplay Ads let viewers demo a game directly on Twitch. No download, no wait — just click and play. So far we’ve partnered with THQ Nordic on REAMINAL, and with IO Interactive on Hitman: World of Assassination.
We’ll continue to experiment and partner with game studios to bring additional titles to Gameplay Ads in the future, and expand regional support beyond North America to Europe and Asia.
Streamer-Led Promos
In June last year, we launched Streamer-Led Promotions. This lets creators offer a 35% discount on gift sub bundles at a time of their choosing — from a Partnerversary, to their cat’s birthday. We’ve seen over 450,000 promotions since launch, and channels running gift sub discounts are seeing up to 80% more gift subs during promotional events. So, we’re increasing the total promotional hours offered over a year by 20% — to 96 hours. This gives creators even more opportunity to offer discounts when it’s best for their communities.
Drops
In the last year over 36 million viewers claimed a Drop on a streamer’s channel, and Drops that require a subscription to unlock put an additional $11M in streamers pockets.
We’ve updated the Drops experience to make it easier to see which Drops are available on a channel, how to earn them, and where to track your progress. And, we updated users’ inventory pages on both web and mobile, so you can easily find your favorite Drops.
Less Fees for Eurozone streamers
If you’re a streamer in an EU country that uses the Euro, you’ve been losing 1–2.5% of your earnings to currency conversion fees. We’re getting rid of that. Starting this summer, your SEPA payouts can be converted to Euros with no conversion fees and lower transfer costs. More of your money stays your money. We’ll notify you once the update is live.
Community & Belonging
Mod Appreciation
This year at TwitchCon, we celebrated Mod Appreciation Day. We’re excited to share that we are offering founding members of the Mod Club the opportunity to apply for an exclusive chat badge (by June 30).
Plus, starting next week, we’ll show Mod Anniversaries in chat. This feature will follow the format of subscriber anniversaries, but on a 6-month cadence instead of monthly.
We’re always thinking about ways to make mods’ lives easier, and have been working behind the scenes to improve AutoMod by adding smart detection. This is a learning model that understands context and nuance, but is also incredibly reliable. Now, AutoMod will be more capable of connecting those dots and taking action.
There are no changes needed on the streamer and moderator side. It’s fully automated and updates over time, each and every time a moderator takes action. We encourage streamers and moderators to keep using AutoMod to benefit from these improvements and keep our community safe.
Expanding our Guilds
Twitch Unity Guilds are designed to give people of all identities a place to learn, share, inspire, and grow. More than 8,000 streamers participate in our four existing guilds, and we’re excited to welcome three more: Asian Guild, the Disability Guild, and the Indigenous Guild.
💜
And that’s it! Thank you for another exciting TwitchCon, and be sure to keep an eye out for more information on today’s announcements, including details about TwitchCon Berlin, in the coming months.
See you in Chat!
