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.
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!
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!