Twitch happened test Discovery feed for live streams and Clips on mobile since last year, hoping to give users a new way to find new broadcasters to watch and thus spend more time on the platform. Now, the website has announced that it will roll out the feature to all users later this month. The feed will initially appear as a new tab in the mobile app, allowing viewers to switch between a scrollable feed for live streams and another feed for Clips. As the name suggests, the live feed will show users streams from people they already follow and ongoing streams from people they don’t follow based on their watch history. Meanwhile, the Clips feed will be populated with short snippets from live broadcasts.
Users will be able to join broadcasts in progress from a live feed by tapping on broadcasters’ avatars to instantly enter theater mode. Twitch will also show when the streamer is live in the Clips feed, so viewers can check them out there as well. And in case it wasn’t clear, Twitch explained in its announcement that the discovery feed will only aggregate streams and clips from the service, and creators won’t be able to upload directly to it. In other words, being featured in the feed is a game of chance, although featured Clips will take precedence over those not featured.
The discovery feed launched this month is not its final form. Some users may start seeing the feed as their actual homepage sometime next month, which is what Twitch originally intended for the feature. In early March, the company’s CEO, Dan Clancy, said that the service introduced a mobile application first major redesign years later and the discovery feed will be its new landing page.
