Twitch’s Watch Parties are giving Twitch streamers the chance to host live streams of content from Amazon Prime‘s extensive catalog of movies and television shows which will include the host’s webcam and live-chat channel features, according to the Washington Post.
While anyone can watch these live-streams, even if they do not have a Twitch account, the Watch Parties require viewers to have an active Amazon Prime membership in order to take part in the livestream events.
“Because Twitch’s desire is to build communities around interactive experiences, we were already set for success when it came to products like this,” Erin Wayne, the director of community and creator marketing at Twitch said, via the article. “We were already on track to launch these types of things ahead of covid-19. It just happened to coincide with all of the things that we were doing.”
Twitch pushed up the timeline for Watch Parties due to the COVID-19 pandemic which has seen a massive uptick, not only in streaming, but in the consumption of content on streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu.
With the demand at an all-time high, Twitch moved to ramp up their own supply of content.
“We moved the timeline up,” Michael Aragon, Twitch’s senior vice president of content said. “What we’re looking to do is make sure that we continue to evolve this as quickly as we can.”
Watch Parties add another creative element for streamers to utilize for their Twitch channels, and give viewers another way to interact, in real time, with a specific streamer and that channel’s community.
“I think that people who are either not familiar with Twitch or familiar with us in a very entry-level [way], they tend to think of Twitch as just gaming, which is core to who we are as a company,” Wayne said. “But gamers as people are very multifaceted in their interests and their hobbies.”
“If you’ve got a big enough creator, you can be watching with 30,000 other people,” Aragon said. “That is bigger than any movie theater that I’ve ever seen.
“We’ve always been about community and bringing people together” Aragon added.
