[Feature] Guest Star
Hi all,
Guest Star is a tool we're developing, which makes it easy, safe & fun for streamers to invite guests (viewers or other streamers) to join your stream. We have recently released an early version of the tool to a select group of streamers to help us shape the final product experience via testing the technology and providing feedback on the experience. To learn more about Guest Star, please visit our help article (https://link.twitch.tv/GuestStarFAQs); and for those with early access, please share your feedback on here on UserVoice!
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Yavoroshko commented
It would be great if you will add ability to see resolution and fps of camera, also to change it in case of difficulties.
But the must have feature is the ability to show/hide nicknames of streamers on browser source, because it looks weird with some fancy overlays or show designs, or sometimes does not fit at all. Also this nicknames interfere with mirroring the source in streaming software. -
jrobthehuman commented
Sometimes the red Join The Stream: Requests are On banner gets stuck on, even when the requests have been closed. I've experienced this on my end in Stream Manager, in my chat in OBS and some viewers have experienced this as well.
Some viewers have also said they've had issues in the iOS app when Guest Star is active.
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P5ingletary commented
With the ability to @ twitch channels in a title, having the Guest Star(s) append the stream title with the guest would be a great automation.
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AgentDave7 commented
Update for anyone that missed Episode 18 of Patch Notes (May 17, 2023):
Source: https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/patch-notes-18
[Invite from Chat]
- All streamers can now invite users directly to join their stream from chat through a new “Add Guest” button that they can click when viewing a user’s chat profile card.
- Using this invite flow will quickly open a new Guest Star session if they don’t have one open, and add the guest into the queue to easily bring them on stream while the streamer is already live.
- Guest Star Moderators can use Invite from chat to support their streamers as well when viewing Stream Chat in Guest Star Mod View, too!
- There’s always someone in chat with a hot take or something interesting to add. Now you can safely pull them on stream to talk about it live with just a few clicks.[Advanced Audio Controls]
- We launched this update last week to give Guest Star streamers and guests more control over their audio settings.
- Musicians can now collaborate more easily with their community or other musicians using Guest Star.
- Some web browsers like Chrome force audio presets on video calls. Usually this is fine, but for more advanced audio setups, like those used by musicians, it causes all sorts of issues.
- Web users can now disable or enable settings like echo cancellation, noise suppression, and auto gain control.
- Advanced Audio Controls allows users to enable or disable these presets based on their audio needs.[Auto-Add Guests]
- This feature cuts down the number of steps to push a guest live. When the auto-add feature is enabled, invited guests are automatically added to the backstage call after they accept the invitation and complete setup.
- As a reminder, “backstage” is the step in Guest Star where you can vet your guests to make sure everything is good to go before you push them live on your stream.
- Through this functionality, we hope to make Guest management more seamless when streamers are either setting up a collaborative stream or are quickly rotating between different Guests while live. At this time, Auto-Add Guests will slot the first invited Guest that is Ready in Queue but we aim to provide settings in the future for streamers to determine who in the queue should be prioritized in being automatically slotted in.[Guest Star Streams in Left Nav]
- This update makes Guest Star guests visible on the Left Sidebar, where viewers can see who’s live from channels they follow or recommended channels.
- When you’re hosting guests on-stream, your followers will be able to see that you’re live and streaming with others. -
krinlee commented
I love the idea of this tool, but for some reason I was trying it out with my bot account and it wouldn't show the guest's camera in the OBS browser source. It was showing within Guest Star just not in the browser source in OBS. I definitely had a camera on for both accounts, and they were both showing in Guest Star.
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Pigmess commented
Guest Star has a lot of interesting potential and I hope to see it continue to evolve. My initial thoughts after some experimentation are as follows:
1. Guest Star should ideally allow the chosen camera to be passed through as a virtual device on the client, which could then be provided to a source in streaming software.
2. Guest Star should ideally be able to accept a guest's single webcam feed to be shared among multiple guest star sessions.
3. Unless mic audio quality is improved to a reasonable standard, I believe many users will opt to pass audio over a separate call - notably, diminishing the overall value add of Guest Star over cropped window captures of a separate video call.
4. It's my opinion that first-time guests shouldn't need a setup wizard to get started. Terms like "backstage" are fun and work well enough for the host, but terms and user flows with widespread use like "preview camera" and "test audio" could be used to greatly simplify the guest onboard process, necessary if streamers realistically want to incorporate on-the-fly use of Guest Star with viewers and community members.
5. Whether in documentation or in the context of Guest Star itself, it should be made clear what resolution(s) - and ideally bitrate(s) - are supported for the video transmission, to avoid unnecessary up- and/or downscaling resulting in loss of quality or pointless overhead. (Apologies if this exists and I have missed it.)
I am so far very pleased with the feature as rolled out but have a number of ideas that I hope will become more viable in more cases as Guest Star develops. I would be happy to provide context or otherwise flesh out any of the above if desired, but for now will opt for relative brevity.
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MaelstromALPHA commented
This feature is great, but we *need* the ability to turn off the automatic microphone processing that Guest Star applies. There seems to be some noise removal and maybe echo cancellation happening, which we have found results in some really awful audio quality on our end.
An option to accept "raw/unprocessed microphone input" would be appreciated.
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Gxeuh commented
I don't figure out how to stream with a Guest Star who is actually streaming with me as a Guest Star. Can we have two windows on Guest Star ?
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Dayclic commented
Guest Star is really cool but one main feature is missing : share a guest screen as a source for OBS. Thanks :)
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acerswap commented
1. Sharing screen is not working. I try to share my screen and only get the name in the lower left side.
2. Integrating this with Twitch Studio should be a priority. Also, creating some kind of controller through phone/tablet will be interesting.
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eisteetrinker commented
Since you like to plaster my emails and notifications with this feature, I have one singular feedback: requiring chrome and a verified phone makes this unusable. Unless this changes I will never be able to even try it.
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IceMasterJoseph commented
For the android mobile viewing experience there is no way to hide the large guest star banner at the bottom in landscape mode. I and most likely others would like to hide it during landscape viewing as it feels intrusive.
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Chrispe66 commented
Some viewers experienced issues watching my stream from mobile once Guest Stars were active on stream. Chrome was the only browser that worked well for creators and viewers who joined as a guest star. It was not clear as to how I was able to put myself in Guest Star production room then share my video feed from there to stream. My guests were suffering from a few second delay and heard me twice as they could see me on stream but not in back end room.
I like the idea, and I’m sure I’ll grow with it, just had some weird experiences.
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AnnaProsser commented
I love Guest star! It solves so many challenges that talk show and group gaming streamers have faced.
I think a very important and powerful opportunity to help a specific subset of creators comes with this product: to allow "credit" to be given to guests when they appear on a stream. This could include giving them backend accounting of the views/hours/CCUs that they helped bring into the host stream as a guest, having an indication show up on their channel that they are live on another, and, ideally, even giving streamers an option to share or split income that comes during a certain stream, like cheers.
Some important use cases of this could be, for example:
-A popular and prolific esports commentator is live on Twitch every day, but never on their own channel, so they are not recognized as an affiliate or partner, and so are not identified as a community member, or invited to participate in Twitch initiatives. If their channel backend showed their extensive hours watched, and their own channel could indicate when they are live on another channel, that could help Twitch identify their contribution, and help the commentator cultivate an audience on Twitch that they are then motivated to stay loyal to and engage with more than they would on other platforms.
-A team of 5 streamers performs on a weekly show that they co-produce, but they have to choose only one streamer's channel to be live on. They choose the streamer that has the biggest audience, in order to get the most eyes on the show. Thus, the host streamer either gets all the benefits/income from that show, or they have to engage in the complicated process of determining what income came just from that time when the show was live in order to fairly share. Either way, the other 4 streamers' audiences will not get alerted when their own channels are not live. If the other streamers' channel pages could show that they are live on another channel, this could help bring all of the audiences together, and if there were backend tools that helped make the benefits to a channel reflect the collaborative process that is a group show, it would incentivize more collaboration, and, again, help Twitch identify prolific streamers who may get "big numbers" weekly, but not on their own channel.
I wrote a Twitter thread about this before the feature came out that perhaps explains the idea more fully, if that's of interest: https://twitter.com/annaprosser/status/1385266663226961926
There are also following opportunities here for streamers to help recognize behind the scenes contributors, like writers, producers, and mods, and for audiences to celebrate and follow even those creators who are not the "faces" of channels.
I hope this gives you food for thought. Thanks so much for working on products made to help streamers who love to collaborate!
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AshSaidHi commented
I love Guest Star! I would be great if closed captioning options were available for this tool!
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DoctorPulsar commented
I noticed this last night while moderating for someone, and went to check it out to see if it would be useful for them, myself, and others in the future, but I couldn't because it only supports Chrome for some reason. Please provide support for other browsers like FireFox so we can actually test it out and use it.
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SandyAJ commented
A feature, when a video feed is not available, it would be nice to show the guest's twitch icon as a substitute instead of a white screen.
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NekoJoni commented
I like the tool, but I have on big problem.
Automatic microphone volume control.Even if I switch off "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device" in the Windows audio control, it change the volume level.
It needs an option in Twitch Guest Star to turn it off.
At the moment it kills all microphone sound settings with the used microphone.
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jckobeh commented
Tested it last night. It would be convenient to have the streamer's chat show up in the Guest Star page for the host and all guests; we found this was lacking as my guest had a window open on the Guest Star page to see my webcam feed, but would have had to open another window and rearrange their desktop to see the chat simultaneously. Same goes for the streamer, as even on a multi-monitor setup, If I want to see the webcam feed from the person I'm talking to bigger than the OBS preview monitor (where it's probably scaled down) I would need to juggle several windows to have the Guest Star page and chat visible.
Otherwise, being able to change the font size on the browser source from the Guest star page, as well as perhaps font style and colour, and having the browser source in OBS get a reactive is-talking border that can be colour-customized would be good. This seems a cleaner solution than asking users to manually input 16:9 aspect ratios of arbitrary scales to fit their overlay. Let them scale the browser source AND THEN go back to the Guest Star page and fine-tune the name label & etc.
Latency seems to be pretty pretty low, so I'm excited to test it with multiple guests and evaluate performance VS other platforms we've used in the past to host multiple talking heads. Even for a beta, it would be great to also have at least firefox support.
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MrNY2Cali commented
Add Guest Star service to the Status.Twitch.TV page to be alerted to when it may be down or having issues.