Twitch Chat Replay Finally Added To Past Broadcasts
The feeling of live chat will come to Twitch VOD’s via Chat Replay, bringing add-ons and extensions to the basic experience.
While an important part of watching a Twitch live stream is the call-and-response atmosphere that brings viewer and broadcaster together (on a 30-second delay), not everyone is able to watch their favorite streamers as they go live. Without Youtube video on demand (VOD) support, viewers are forced to watch the replays without that live chat interaction, sacrificing the feel of that interactivity. That is, until today, as Twitch announced that Chat Replay can now be added to past broadcasts.
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Rolling out over the next few weeks, today the Twitch team will be recording the content coming into chat messages, which will gradually be recorded and available for future recorded videos. Subscriber notifications, badges, emotes and, of course, text will be displayed as they happened during the live stream.
These new functions coming to Twitch were improved upon the ReChat browser extension/add-on, with the author joining the official Twitch team last year. Any person with moderation abilities on a channel will be able to delete individual chat messages once the broadcasts go live.
That last function is very interesting, considering the nature of some of these Twitch channels. While the forward-facing ability to moderate illegal/disallowed content from chat remains the focus, providing unbridled access to filter out the chat of record, especially when trying to prove examples of mod abuse within chat (that the moderators, themselves, can post-facto remove), are ripe for controversy.
Considering how drama is a core component for many people running channels on Twitch, I hope that the admin team will hold an original copy in cases of future disputes.