Twitch has taken a big step toward making its streams more customizable, interactive, and engaging. The video platform has announced a series of extensions, which append specific tools, displays, and other add-ons to channel pages and live video streams.
The list of Twitch extensions contains more than 20 choices at the time of the feature’s launch, with third-party developers like Streamlabs and Muxy delivering several new toys for streamers. The available extensions include a virtual pet that interacts with the on-screen action, game-specific trackers for titles like League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Rocket League, and a heat map that follows viewers as they move around the screen. Streamer GiantWaffle demonstrated the last of those three examples in a recent clip:
One of the most exciting extensions is an integration with Amazon, which owns Twitch after purchasing it for close to a billion dollars in 2014. Members of Twitch’s Affiliates program can now link up with a similar initiative from Amazon. In doing so, they can use an extension to advertise specific items they use in their streams and can link to the Amazon retail pages for those items. Should their activity lead to any purchase, they will be rewarded with commissions.
Add-ons are not new to Twitch streams, but with the launch of its extensions, the video platform is working more closely with third-party developers. “Twitch is a platform where communities create, share, and interact with the content they love,” said Ryan Lubinski, Product Manager for Extensions at Twitch, in a press release. “With Twitch Extensions, we’re taking interactivity to the next level by empowering our developer community to create customized interactive content, directly integrated with the Twitch platform, opening up a whole new world of creator-viewer interaction.”
Twitch hopes that more developers will design their own extensions to add to the current roster. If you have a relevant idea you wish to bring to fruition, you can find more information at the Twitch Developers homepage.
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