Dear twitch,

“gamestreams” is a great app for LG smart tvs (webOS) that allows one to watch twitch streams directly on the tv without the need of using some other casting devices. Unfortunately after the API V3+5 change/shutdown the app suddenly stopped working. I’m sure there are lots of people watching twitch on LG tvs and we’d like to able to do so in the future. After reaching out to the developer of the gamestreams app i got the following answer from Reemet Paabo:

“Yes Twitch.tv is closing down the V3 and V5 API endpoints that we are using and therefor we will have to rewrite the whole Application.
Now, I had started to rewrite the whole application and it was going well, until I hit a brick wall with the Twitch Embed player that I have to use.
It has that Maturity check on it, " Content is rated mature” and you have to press “Start watching” button to continue, unfortunatly there is no way to bypass that and its only clickable, which LG does not allow. You have to be able to use the button with OK key aswell. I’ve tried all kinds of solutions but always end up with cross-origin-policy error ( since the player is “cloning” another website, you can not execute code within it ). For now I’ve given up because there’s no way around cross-origin-policy and sadly twitch developers will not help us eather."

As far as i can tell the developer is willing to adopt to your new API, but is also limited by LG and webOS features. It would be awesome if you could support Reemet in any way or extend your new API so that keyboard events can be used and help to keep the gamestreams app - with that twitch - on LG tv alive.

kind regards,
Michael

P.S: I’m just a sad consumer and not affiliated with gamestreams, LG or twitch in any way

Using the unofficial Twitch apps that existed previously on tvOS, it was extremely easy to navigate stream recordings that are often 5-6 hours long. Since the official Twitch app debuted, all the third-party apps have ceased development, so we're stuck with the bad video controls of the official app. This could be solved by using the standard tvOS video control APIs that almost every other app uses. Examples:

1. While watching a long Overwatch stream, when the streamer was queuing for a match, I could easily tap the right edge of the trackpad to jump forward in small increments, until I could see on screen that a match had started. Then I could tap the left edge of the trackpad once to jump back to the start of the match. Now, I have to navigate to the fast-forward button, hit it multiple times to get to a fast speed, then navigate back to the play button, see if a match has started, and repeat multiple times. Then once I see a match is in progress, I have to repeat the process in reverse. It's a significantly higher number of button presses and time.




2. If I'm watching a stream while doing something else and miss something important, I used to be able to just tap the left edge of the touchpad and I was instantly back x number of seconds to see what I missed. Now I have to navigate to the rewind button, and choose to either wait for a slow rewind speed, or tap a few times for a fast rewind speed and usually overshoot and rewind way more than I meant to.




3. If I want to skip to the second half of the stream, I used to be able to just choose precisely with a swipe and tap where I wanted to play. Now I have to bring up the menu, go to the fast forward icon, and fast forward at 2048x, usually overshooting where I wanted to go and having to rewind.

All in all, the Twitch app's video navigation is like using a VCR in 2020. I don't understand why it was implemented this way when no other app does it this way, and I'm guessing it took more work to create this custom UX than it would've to use the built-in tvOS API.

(translated from German by DeepL)

Hello, Twitch,

since the release of your new Twitch app for AppleTV I have the following criticisms:

Home page:
- Where can I set "my language" (german) so that under "Channels in my language" I am no longer shown ALL international channels with ALL languages?

Live streams:
- There is no display of how long the current stream has been running (uptime).

Stream recordings ("Earlier broadcasts"):
- The date from when the stream or clip is from is missing - both in the thumbnails and in the enlarged view.
- The rewind and fast forward function is a disaster! It's extremely unwieldy, very inaccurate and totally complicated to use and doesn't take the modern touch interface of the AppleTV remote control into account at all!
- Also missing is a skip function that jumps 10 seconds forward or backward in the video.

Why do you want to "reinvent the wheel" with your new app? Why can't you fall back on well-known and popular functionalities? Even with the recent update of the ARD media library app, the playback of their videos has been changed to the general standard (wiping the touch surface causes the video to be fast-forwarded or rewound, a click causes it to jump 10 seconds back, etc.)

I hope very much that you will revise the app again, because at the moment it's just a big annoyance for me and it's no fun anymore to watch live streams and stream recordings.

Greetings from Germany