Stream Teams used to be a cornerstone of Twitch and worked like small networks or guilds. Back when hosting was a feature you could set your team to be auto-hosted which gave mutual support to anyone on your team automatically. When that was removed Stream Teams atrophied and are now a nearly worthless feature.

I'd like to bring Stream Teams back into the spotlight and hopefully save this feature and improve it for everyone. As such, here are a list of potential improvements and reworks that may get it back on track.

If you've never heard of a Stream Team you can find ours here. https://www.twitch.tv/team/piratecrew

You can also read about Twitch Teams here. https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/twitch-teams?language=en_US

1. Stream Teams linked in Stream Title
   Currently Stream Teams are only listed in the about section of your channel and only as a single line of text next to your follower amount. This text line is only modifiable by changing the Brand Color for your entire channel. Setting your color to black makes this link grey text like everything else on the page. https://i.imgur.com/wSb1Hmr.png Making this feature more visible and doing it in a way that streamers can control would go a long way. You can currently link to other channels in your Stream Title with @ so why not leverage this same tech for Stream Teams?

2. Following Stream Teams
   Right now a viewer needs to follow each member of a Stream Team to see them online. This is cumbersome and requires going to each streamers page to follow them. There would be much less friction for the viewer if they could follow the Stream Team and have each stream show up on their follow list as long as the streamer is in the followed team.

3. Allow Affiliates to make Stream Teams
   Right now you can only make a team if you are a Partner and then only through a support ticket request. This adds extra work for Twitch and makes the feature very exclusionary. Streamline the creation process by making a tab in account options. Open this feature to Affiliates to increase adoption.

4. Team Emotes
   Have emotes that unlock for viewers that follow the team as described in section 2. This would incentivize engaging with this system and give team logos and branding a place in the ecosystem.

5. Team Charity Events
   Right now the only way to do this is through third party tools and Twitch only allows first party integration on a single channel not shared with the team. Setting up a call to action on the Stream Team page would be a huge benefit and give a common goal for a group of communities.

6. Team Hype Trains
   A special Team Train could start when more than one streamer in a team is live. This would then visually combine the Bits/Subs between the communities involved in the train. This would encourage teams to stream together and make flash-point support moments where everyone wins. Bits/Subs thrown into the train would still go to their respective streamers but this brings a greater sense of community to teams and supporting streamers.

Understand that this is not an exhaustive list and there are tons more options. My hope is to use this as a springboard and save this failing feature before it gets cut for underperformance. Make sure you leave a comment below with your ideas!