CommPRO.biz Editorial StaffPopular social video service Twitch kicked off TwitchCon 2017’s keynote touting a new theme--“our stage, your story.”This theme was used to show that they are all about bringing everyone together, with a spotlight on creators, publishers and developers. The keynote was headlined by CEO Emmett Shear and hosted by Director of Programming Marcus “djWHEAT” Graham, and featured other key executives, including EVP Broadcaster Success Jonathan Shipman, VP Developer Success Kathy Astromoff, and SVP Commerce Ethan Evans.In addition to celebrating creators, the keynote spotlighted the following community and commerce features and tools for tracking engagement:

• Stream summary: Creators want to know how their stream went after it ends and starting in November, Stream Summary makes that a reality. This summary will include the most relevant stats around viewers, follows, and chat activity, surface top clips, and show how their last stream impacted progress towards becoming an Affiliate or Partner. Timing: November, 2017
• Achievements: Achievements help creators trace the path to Affiliate and Partner status by showing them their progress toward each requirement. Achievements also help creators learn Twitch streaming basics, improve their channel, connect with their community, and more! Timing: November, 2017
• Raids: Raids--a way that creators help each other grow by sharing their community with another channel--are now easier than ever. A new /raid feature allows streamers to seamlessly let their viewers join a raid and then drive traffic to another streamer. This new feature also includes tracking to see who raided your channel and improved moderation features, such as the ability to choose who can raid your channel through new settings.
• Rituals: Rituals make it easier for creators to celebrate special moments that bring their community together. The initial Ritual enables creators to signal to their community in chat that a visitor is new to the channel and to welcome them. Timing: November, 2017
• Premieres: Premieres allow creators to maximize the excitement, anticipation, and viewership around new uploaded content by creating live first-viewing events. Similar to how people gather around the TV for the debut of a favorite show, fans can now do the same virtually for a creator’s new uploaded content. Creators can watch along with their community to provide insights, commentary, or just enjoy the show with their community. Timing: Q4 2017
• Rooms: With Rooms, creators can develop smaller, parallel chat groups for users with shared interests, including moderators, subscribers, followers, and other community members. Timing: Q4 2017
• Subscription gifting: Subscription Gifting allows anyone to gift 1-month subscriptions to any streamer’s channel to anyone on Twitch. Timing: Pre-holiday, Q4 2017In-Extension purchases: Enables partners and affiliates to earn revenue from developer-created digital items that viewers buy within Extensions. Timing: Beta in November, 2017

The following milestones were also announced:

• Twitch’s commitment to building the most means of monetization for creators has resulted in a massive year-over-year increase in revenue. In 2017, more than double the amount of money was paid to individual Partners with 71% more money generated on average.
• Twitch Prime, which was announced at TwitchCon 2016, has been a huge success, bringing in 50% more subscriptions for streamers. That works out to one new sub every four seconds.
• Representing one of the most successful discovery features Twitch has launched is Clips, which are up to 60 second snippets of video. There have been more than 1 billion views of Clips on Twitch since launch, including over 2.4 million views for the most-watched Clip of all time by JurassicJunkie.
• Earlier this year, Twitch expanded monetization support to tens of thousands of non-partnered streamers with the Twitch Affiliates Program. Within six months after its launch, over 110,000 creators have joined the program.
• To ensure the best quality of service, video delay has been reduced an average of 60%.
• AutoMod, the machine-based learning chatbot that ensures creators can effectively mitigate inappropriate behavior in chat, currently scans over 320 million chat messages a month.
• Twitch Extensions are a new set of tools that allow developers to help creators customize their channel pages with interactive experiences. They’re flexible, dynamic, easy to build, and easy to use. In the six weeks since launch, streamers have shared their extensions with over 15 million viewers, and more than 1100 developers have registered to create an Extension.

TwitchCon is Twitch's annual convention that celebrates the platform's entire community. This includes the content creators, viewers, and the brands that cater to them. TwitchCon 2017 is the third annual TwitchCon event and has continued to evolve the experience for attendees with more exhibitors/sponsors, sessions, and top creators. To view live or archived content, visit the TwitchCon event portal.