At the time of typing this, my laptop can't render the video of my desired stream at 160p. As a result, the broadcast is frozen, it won't/can't process ads either and may eventually force me to give up my would-be watch time hours (meaning lost money for Twitch, lost potential ad views for third-party clients, lost watch time and engagement for the streamer, and dissatisfaction from a viewer). This is the biggest kind of loss. I can watch and receive ads without quality of life features that other suggestions might mention, but not being able to use Twitch at all because I have to stream video that I don't necessarily need-? There's no good side to this feature being absent. There is however an unknown amount of lost watch time as a result of this --as it's often a minority of people who go through this whole process and do so correctly.

Allow audio-only in the browser version of twitch

Just like the apps, allow audio-only in browsers!

I hope our comments are heard and this feature becomes available soon for pc user. We'll be very thankful

For now, there are extensions like Twitch Radio Mode. I use it to preserve absurdly expensive US data while away from home.

Easy and important!

So, I have access to audio only in the video settings on my mobile app on my phone while I'm watching a stream. However, when I am on my browser watching from my desktop the feature isn't there, and I thought to myself, why doesn't the browser twitch have this as an option as many people may not have encoding, and their viewers may just want to at least listen to the stream. Some viewers don't have the bandwidth to crank out 1080p download to watch stream, so I think it would be a good addition, it should be quite quick to add as well, considering it is already in the mobile app.

I think a good idea would be to create "audio only streams" for things such as podcasts, interviews, or for just normal conversation. The streamer would be able to stream with just a microphone, engage with their audience on a more personal level, answer questions from chat, possibly even have the ability to add others into the stream as well, similar to a radio station taking calls from viewers.

give it us guys pls c'mon

ye we rly need this

The ability to stream audio in a channel pages “chat”. This would make it easier for people who watch streams on their TV and using their phone to chat, they could have the audio played on their phone so they won’t disturb anyone else.

we need this for sure

6 years later and we still need this

I also like this idea

+1

This feature is so needed. It's on mobile so why not pc. It really helps decrease power consumption, data/bandwidth usage, and helps increase performance for us multitaskers by eliminating video rendering in background for gaming and listening to streams.

+1

This only audio option is really important to add. Not only for people who only want to hear the audio without having to load the video, but it is also necessary to be able to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions due to video streaming, which is far for negligible. Thanks!

Hello, I live somewhere where the internet speed/mbps is low. Some of the people that I follow have streams are in 720 only or greater which causes the receiving transmission on my end to buffer and lag often. I mostly just want to listen, so having an audio only or video toggle would be nice.

tldr: it could be implemented, excluding advertisements of course .. a toggle for video or at least an option for low res so that those of us with lower bandwidth can listen without choppy or broken interception.

Should be easy to add as Twitch already has audio-only option in the Android app (and youtube-dl confirms that there is in fact an audio-only stream available), however it's not available as an option in the Web UI.