Hi,
My name is Ludovic Iochem, I am in the senior management team of a Visual effects company called DNEG, multi Oscars winner Company.
I am on twitch under the name : Keepcalmiminvfx
I have been streaming for a couple of month and are slowly but surely building my community around a Discord Server counting more than 2800 after 3 months (the biggest VFX Discord available).

I am a friend of a few Twitch Streamer, also streaming Visual Effects related contents, review sessions and techniques demonstration like Hugo's Desk, AndrewHogdson3D, STFvfx, etc...
More and more people from the Industry are coming on twitch to follow our Streams.
We are all moving towards the Partnership but we can feel a reason why more people are not joining.

I would like to ask you if we could create a Visual Effects Category, which would allow us to really promote CGI, 3D and 2D techniques used for Films, commercial and animation.

My senior position allows me to bring High end Visual Effects Supervisor to stream some Live Comments sessions night, etc. But we would need a better representation with the possibility to have a dedicated section, ether "Visual Effects" or "VFX and Animation".

Please let me know what you think about it.
I am happy to discuss more.

Regards
Ludo

Ranging from writing and discussing novels, to poetry, scripts, comics, article editing, tabletop campaign planning, world creation, etc. There are a wide array of people doing various forms of creative writing on twitch, (Counted 53 channels so far, still working on finding more) and often it's hard to decide between "Creative" "Art" or "Just Chatting". Currently all we have to search for similar content is the "Writing" tag, which some of the broader definitions are hesitant to use, and is also used by people writing computer code, which is honestly a very different type of content despite it's visual similarities.

A category for this would seriously help us to find content and be found by the wider community of storytelling or wordsmithing fans that use twitch, as well as make it easier for twitches algorithm to identify what we watch. (I am often recommended visual art streams because I watch a lot of writers that use the art category, but never recommended any writing channels, and others I have spoken to experience the same)

The following titles are the original and ports/expansions of the same game:
* Phantasy Star Online
* Phantasy Star Online ver. 2 (expansion--note this is different than Phantasy Star Online 2 which is a different game and should be separate)
* Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II (port + expansion)
* Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II Plus (essentially just a patch!)
* Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst (port + expansion)

I and a few other PSO streamers realized how many fellow streamers of this game we were never aware of because there are streams in each of these categories, so combining them seems like a good idea so that our little community doesn't have to follow 5 versions. I believe other games (such as Pokémon flavors in the same generation, StarCraft II, etc.) have been combined before.

These categories are all part of the same games.

Neverwinter Nights:
* Neverwinter Nights
* Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition
* Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark
* Neverwinter Nights: Kingmaker
* Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide

There is also Neverwinter Nights 2:
* Neverwinter Nights 2
* Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer
* Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir
* Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate

Combining these categories would mean it would be much easier for viewers to find streams of the game they are looking for. The extra categories are just dlcs or an enhanced edition of the game.

Add/create a data-tree style internal system to keep track of which games are part of which series and/or are remakes/ports/remasters of other games so that if someone wished to browse through, for example, all streamers playing any legend of zelda game, they could. This would also allow people to browse through, for example, specifically streamers playing Pokémon: Mystery Dungeon: Red/Blue Rescue team as well as Pokémon: Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, since DX is a remake of Red/Blue. This could increase traffic to streamers playing lesser-known or less popular games from a series since few people would be looking for streamers playing that game specifically, but may have been inclined to watch that streamer if they had been able to locate them using this suggested broader category browsing by browsing through the streamers playing games from the series as a whole.

As many of you know twitch has little to no discoverability so I considered ideas on how that could change. Engagement is a huge part of a strong community and this system would reward it. The idea came to me from the Pre Roll Ad function. Pre roll ads are the ads you encounter when entering a streamers stream and twitch has a way to temporarily turn them OFF. When you manually run an ad from the dashboard the Pre Roll Ads turn off for a designated amount of time based on the length of the ad you ran. So I thought why can’t the “view” count do something similar through chat engagement? Let’s say you have 5 viewers and 2 of them are actively engaging with your stream, you would get a “phantom” +2 viewers. Your viewer count would remain 5 but you “engagement” number would be 7. The thought is that you would change position in the category you are in based on your "Engagement" number rather than your view count. This way more engaging communities will see quicker growth while being higher in the category of their choosing.

My thoughts were chat engagement would give you 60 seconds per the individual chatter, this timer would have to run down before it could be reset just like the Pre-Roll Ad Off function. Subscriptions would grant you 120 seconds, follows 60 seconds, cheers 90 seconds, etc. All of these counters would count per individual chatter and actions of the same type would not stack, for example if a chatter speaks in chat and says something again 15 seconds later the time will NOT add 60 more seconds until their original chat timer expired. However if that chatter follows, subscribes, cheers, etc THEN time would be added.

Imagine being raided with this system. You could have 100 viewers and 25 active chatters giving you an “engagement” number of 125. Now imagine receiving a raid of 100 viewers in which 50 of them spammed you with emotes and messages adding 50 “phantom” views to your “engagement” count which let’s say spurs an additional 25 of your original viewers to interact in response to the raid adding 25 more “phantom” viewers to your “engagement” count. That would bring your “viewer” count to 200 and your “engagement” count to 300 AND it would last for at least 60 seconds which is longer than a lot of raiders actually stick around and that’s not including follows, cheers and subs that may also occur. Through a raid you would be able to climb higher in the category you are in and hold that position potentially long enough to organically gain additional viewers to your stream.

If you made it this far I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas one this! Ill likely have a YouTube video discussing this topic because I would love to hear what Twitch staff would say on the subject.

Increase discoverability and browsability:

The discover page should feature a section with a continuous, hashtag filterable, clips section. In an internet browser ala Firefox there should be a possibility to hover to follow and/or like a clip without leaving the page and the possibility to click through to a user's page. The algorithm should focus on a mixture of fresh content, and popular content, and ideally "learn" from the users actions.

On the mobile app this should be the FIRST and only feature on the front page, with the hamburger menu or swipe action available for changing focus.

This would dramatically increase the time and focus a user spent on the platform, increase the discoverability and browsability of content creators. Ultimately this would be a great way to "hook" a user on to twitch content, rather than having then migrate to another platform (like f.ex. YouTube) if they don't immediately find a creator they follow or find interesting who is live, and importantly retain users on the platform after a stream ends.

Hopefully, you all agree with my suggestion and are already hard at work implementing this, or a similar feature. :)