Give viewers the ability to favorite their favorite channels. These favorited channels will take priority on the new "following" bar on the left.

For example, the viewer follows TimTheTatMan, Summit1G, Lirik.
All of which stream relatively around the same time. However, the streamer is partial to watching Lirik over the other two. Favoriting Lirik would put him towards the top of this 'following' list on the left, to allow quick access to the viewer.

This is a grand option for viewers that enjoy smaller channels but still have follows on the larger ones, as it bump the smaller channels to the top of their following list.

It seems like the top-listed games have 1000 viewers. But the weird thing is at it's probably about nine hundred separate playthroughs of the game which means dying out of 10 of those playthroughs only have one viewer.

Instead of ranking by total viewers,. It could be switchable to other rankings like most streams, most viewers on a single stream, highest average viewers per stream among the category of similar things. and also the statute show total simultaneous streans, total viewers in category. and most viewers to single-stream/ subcategory.

That way if you want to chat about a game,. You want to see what game category or individual stream has the most viewers.

When I start streaming I'm probably going to be a game gourmet taking requests for games. Same goes for watching others.

Most people do not think of an exact title first.

They think of general categories like:
what era of console war the game was in, or who the system manufacturer was, (or combine both of those above categories for specific system),

as well as game publisher, any famous game creator/studio could have their own folder assuming someone tags them, genres of game content being played starting with the most general and filtering down to more specific. The goal of the goal, (like one credit completion, fastest speed run, one credit points record, beat the story mode, etc). Also expected streamer content and acceptable cheddar content should be filtered. (Use 6+, 10+, 13+ and 18+ in different categories, and independent streamer and chatter ratings, like one person I know should get 13+ for **** clothing, but 6+ [maybe 10+] in acceptable man/woman topic chat allowed). I was kicked out of that channel before the man/wonan talk level was explicitly 6+). And any information the streamer thinks is important, and/or the chatter is willing to search. Have all options available and ask for an O vote to filter in, an X vote to filter out, or a dash vote if either yes or no is acceptable.

Please consider a "channel surf" option under categories. The feature would work as so: the viewer clicks on a game, category, etc, and is presented with a list of streams. How do they know which one to choose? There is no way to easily "surf" through the channels to pick one which is appealing to you. There would be a "surf" button or similar which would open a viewer that will show a 10-15 second preview of the channels to the viewer, in the order in which they are currently displayed on the page per the viewer's sort option. The viewer will have a way to stay with the stream if they like it, going to the streamers page (preferably seamlessly without a stream interrupting page load required) otherwise they will surf to the next channel for another preview and then the next until they select a stream. Would help with discovery!

High-rank Overwatch streamers usually get ~20 mins of queueing right now and that is often filled with another game or a youtube game.

I suggest a way to only view streams that are in-game, and to automatically go to the next streamer if the current stream doesn't have any gameplay. Or to have some small badge saying "In-Game" show up on the thumbnail.

The easiest way of implementing this is using some lightweight ML Video Classification. I assume you are probably using a GPU to do remux, and you can utilize those GPUs for classification inferencing. You probably won't even need to classify each frame, probably once every 10 seconds.

I think having the ability to watch a short playback of the stream you hover would be an efficient way to help people watch content that they want to see instead of going through stream and guessing on what is going on in the live stream at the current moment, (getting baited from a thumbnail picture.) It might help people with low viewer count get more attention because people don't need to waste time to click on the live stream. It might be a good idea to test out a beta version to see if the idea is successful before permanently implementing the hover feature for the future.