At long last, Sony consoles are getting a Twitch.tv app.
At the TwitchCon keynote today, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear announced a native PlayStation app that will allow users to watch Twitch streams from the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, or PlayStation Vita. The app will be released this fall.
The PlayStation 4 makes it easy to stream your own games to Twitch, but this will be the first app dedicated to viewing Twitch streams. Goodbye, horrible browser navigation.
More changes to Twitch were announced during the keynote.
Users will be able to create a playlist of their channel’s highlights and broadcasts, so you can showcase the best ones on your channel’s main page. Viewers will be able to chat while watching the playlist.
You will also be able to upload custom thumbnails for highlights and broadcasts, just like you can on YouTube. Twitch’s Whispers are also updating.
Whispers, which was introduced in June, lets users send private messages within the global chat, no matter what broadcast they’re watching. With Whispers 2.0, Whispers will live in a docked window instead of in the global chat, and your Whispers chat history will be saved.
This is the first TwitchCon, and it’s being held in San Francisco. It’s been a long road for Twitch, which grew out of Justin.tv in 2006. It’s now the largest video game streaming site. Last summer Twitch was bought by Amazon to the tune of almost a billion dollars. Marcus Graham, who also spoke at the keynote, reminded the audience of the dark days.
“We had at max 500 kilobits-per-second video, at 320-by-280 resolution.” Now, Twitch has millions of monthly users, and will soon support HTML5 video. It’s a massive hub for esports, with again millions of viewers tuning in to watch matches.
Being able to watch streams directly from Sony consoles is a huge improvement to the Twitch ecosystem, too. Watching streams where you game? That seems like a no-brainer.
