Thumbnails w/ live preview on hover
I've been thinking about this for a bit, and would love to spitball the idea with someone.
Could it be an idea to enable streamers to make a custom thumbnail for their streams, then have it preview when you hover over said stream.
That way, it would allow people to showcase special things about their streams that make it more interesting.
For instance, I see a lot of competitive players of a bunch of different games using a title like "800+ wins" or "3000 ELO" - So with the custom thumbnails, they could showcase that, and if the viewers were interested, they could simply hover over the stream to see a preview of the live stream.
Obviously, as with everything else, we need some rules if this was implemented.
I would hate to see Twitch turn into YouTube, in the sense of clickbait.
Let me know what you think :)

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AbyssalTenacity commented
Hovering over a followed channel on the sidebar now shows the stream title AND still image preview of the stream. Some may like it but I find it too large and intrusive compared to the precursory, minimalist, title-only preview; would like option to disable/customize what pops up on hover.
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julzie03 commented
Much like Netflix or even Youtube to some degree, it would be beneficial to have the following feature when browsing for new channels:
the ability to hover over stream thumbnails and preview the stream with sound before entering a stream.This would simplify the browsing process for viewers, reduce browsing time and create a more enjoyable and user friendly browsing experience.
As the current filtering system is limited and categories like Just Chatting and Music are so vast in content, this would meet some of the needs in terms of the lack of filtering tools currently available to users/viewers.
From the streamers point of view it would increase the likelihood of being discovered by new viewers, it would attract better community fits/viewers into their channel and reduce their bounce rate.
A great example to support this feature request would be in the 'Music' category. The ability to hear the DJ in a preview form would greatly reduce the time spent searching. This can sometimes become frustrating and a tiring process and can result in not watching anything on Twitch in the end. This is also evident and applicable to the 'Just Chatting' category.
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2TonWaffle commented
This is a good idea and would help to make your stream stand out more. Currently when you look at a category, every single streams just like the other. I wouldn't worry about clickbait as it does help attract viewers and currently people do it with their titles.
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vicodinxtv commented
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.
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Vennox1337 commented
It would be cool if there is a Feature that when you hover over an Stream preview thumbnail it automatically loads the Stream and you can see what happens actually in the Stream. If you dont hover anymore the live preview ends.