WATCH STREAK + MOBILE Updates & More! | Patch Notes HIGHLIGHTS (Feb 2026)

[music] Hello, welcome to Patch Notes. This is our monthly show that's dedicated to you, the community, to keep you up to date on all the things that's going on behind the scenes at Twitch. We should bring Lauren onto this show. So, please everybody welcome Lauren Carney. Hi Lauren. Hi. My name is Lauren Carney. I run health and platform products here at Twitch. So basically everything that helps keep the service safe, fast, and reliable. Today we're launching a targeted enforcement system that matches um the restriction to the offense. So this basically means that users who commit less severe violations still have access to a subset of Twitch experiences on Twitch rather than being suspended from Twitch entirely. Twitch has grown tremendously since our early days and our communities have grown and everybody here has grown with us and we believe it's really important that our policies continue to evolve as well. Our new targeted enforcement system means that restrictions will match the specific offense. So prior to today, anybody who received a suspension, even for really minor offenses that maybe only resulted in a one-day suspension, they lost complete access to Twitch. We felt this often meant that the consequences weren't proportional to the offense and it resulted in a lot of people losing access to their communities for very kind of relatively lowrisisk behavior. So now um Twitch users who commit less severe violations of our policies, they'll lose access only to the specific features related to their violation rather than losing access to the entire Twitch experience. Let's talk a little bit about how the updated enforcement system will actually look. It's my understanding that at launch we'll have two suspension types, streaming and chatting suspensions. Can you tell us this specifically the difference between these two types of uh suspensions? If a user violates our community guidelines while streaming, the suspension will restrict their ability to go live. And then during a streamer suspension, users will still be able to watch streams while logged in. They can chat on other channels. They can access information on their dashboard. And then similarly, if a user violates our community guidelines in chat, they'll receive a chatting suspension. Um, but they'll still be able to stream their own content or watch other streamers. And also, if you receive a chatting suspension, you can continue to chat in your own channel. And that way, you know, you don't lose touch with your community. You can still engage with them. You're just unable to chat in those other streams during the suspension. Can you talk about what it means for higher severity offenses? Higher severity violations are a greater risk to our community. So if someone does receive a higher severity violation, they'll receive both a chatting and a streaming suspension simultaneously to prevent further harm to our users and their communities. And is the case today, those who commit the most serious violations, they will receive an indefinite suspension, and they'll still lose all access to the Twitch service. Last year we introduced escalating consequences which means if you repeatedly violate the same policy you'll receive longer um suspensions each time. Is there any intermixing between these two things? How does it fit together? Yeah, I mean there's going to continue to be escalating consequences. So, if you receive suspensions for violating the same policy category multiple time within the violation's expiration window, the length of your suspension for each subsequent violation increases regardless of whether it's a streaming or a chatting suspension. Those escalating consequences, they still apply. And then if you accumulate multiple temporary suspensions, that could still lead to an indefinite suspension on Twitch. We also just started hitting on some really important things that aren't changing as a part of this update. What else would you say is staying the same? Our community guidelines and our terms of service are not changing and that means what is is and isn't allowed on Twitch. We're also not making changes to any of the lengths, standard lengths of the suspension. So temporary suspensions can still last anywhere between 24 hours and 30 days depending on the specific violation. That's not changing. We're only changing where the suspension is enforced. So again, instead of being suspended from the entire Twitch experience, if there's a violation on a stream, then you're suspended from streaming. If there's a violation in chat, then you can't chat during that time of the suspension. The other thing that's not changing is the process for reporting and appealing suspensions. So anybody who wants to report someone's behavior or an action, anybody who wants to appeal any suspension that they receive, whether it's chatting or streaming, they can still do that in the appeals portal. And that is all exactly the same. So, we've launched a new business manager role. This is in the creator dashboard and it gives agents and managers direct access to help manage a creator's business. When you click this, this person will now have access to analytics overview, stream summary, the sponsorship portal, including your creator profile. You'll also be able to accept and decline sponsorship opportunities on behalf of the creator, and you will receive notifications when new offers arrive. You will also be able to view revenue earnings. So, if you don't want a person to have access to that stuff, please do not uh click this button. It does give them a lot more access. Um, but it doesn't give them access to everything. You can also always undo this if you uh no longer want this person to have access to your analytics. and a lot of things behind the scenes to get access. You go to the creator dashboard to community to roles. You click add new and that assigns um uh that person to the business manager role. Um you accept the role in my assigned roles. Finally, the streamer must accept the sponsorship portal terms before you can access the sponsorship portal. As I highlighted at the beginning, we launched um watch streaks last year. Um so this is a mechanism to celebrate viewers loyalty by tracking and displacing a streak for each consecutive live um uh live stream watch from a specific channel. Streamers and viewers have enjoyed watch streaks and there's been some feedback on ways we can make it even better. Some of the things that we've heard from viewers is that they're not always aware that they're even eligible for a streak until they've earned one. Uh we've recently started experience uh experimenting with ways to address this. So users in the experiment will be able to see their progress towards a streak from day one with a clear streak icon and a count at the bottom of the chat in the channel points window. And so we hope is this will help viewers to start and keep their watch streaks by watching your streams or catching up with clips, stories, and VODs. Last patch notes about a month ago, we shared plans to experiment with the homepage of the mobile app to make the experience more personalized by surfacing content you'd want to see when you first open the app. Starting next month, we're going to be experimenting with adding clips and VODs to your most watched streamers in the live feed. Basically, it's not that different than what many platforms do. A big focus this year is is making sure that short form um becomes more important to our our viewers. We think that's one way to keep retention because you come to the site if the streamers you love aren't live. We still want to give you something to do. Um and however, people don't like to have to navigate to the clips feed or navigate down or go somewhere else. In general, people don't do that. So, what we're going to be doing is just proddding you with some pills or other things to say, "Hey, here's a clip you might like." If you don't want that, you just keep scrolling to keep looking for live content. And uh just to reiterate, it's an experiment. So, we try and use this show to remind you when we're running an experiment so people don't say, "Um, Twitch made a massive update. Um, now I'm seeing clips of Cipher of Tier, but I want to watch live streams only." That's totally okay. Um if we the app recognize that you are always watching cipher of tier every time you you open up the app this experiment may surface a clip of cipher. And so I think the idea here behind it is is the algorithm is trying to recognize if you really like one creator maybe you would be more interested in watching a clip of them than a stream of someone else. But that's what the experiment is for. if um that is an that's that will give us information either way and we will continue to update the mobile app. So on February 12th, we emailed a very limited number of streamers on historical contracts to let them know that they've been migrated to an L2 plus program as a part of a back-end technical update to streamline payouts. But that is just a backend update because they're both technically L2 in in the forms of their payout distribution. That makes more sense in the back end for them to be called um L2 plus program in the back end. Um but these legacy creators have no change to their payouts and they have no requirements. We have a partner plus program. These legacy contracts will now be considered as a level two partner plus. But the only difference between someone who's normally a level two partner plus was someone who normally needs to re-qualify to keep that status. But for these people um uh because this is something that we had done the deal ages ago um they maintain that status and that just wasn't communicated as clearly for some people. We we we tried to communicate it but some people were confused. So um but again for most people it doesn't impact you. So, we just wanted to clarify that we're going to be experimenting with something called pause screen ads and skippable ads to a limited audience on Twitch. So, a pause screen ad is you can see it right here in the screen. It is it's not a um video ad. It's an ad that might pop up when you pause the screen. So, it is non-interruptive in general. Of course, a skippable ad. You can skip after 5 seconds. when we will have skippable ads. Um, and where to use skippable ads is something we need to figure out. Um, uh, especially, you know, like the pre-rolls are particularly well suited for skippable ads. We're working on minimizing how often you end up seeing a pre-roll when you're browsing and looking at new um, new creators and also deal with this issue of you landing in a pre-roll ad so that it doesn't interrupt as you explore. All three of the ad formats D Stan just talked about, they're ongoing experiments. Moving forward, we plan to collect learnings and adapt so that we can ensure the best possible experience. Um, we understand that ads are never like the most popular topic on Twitch, but they are uh a part of the ecosystem here and it's a part of how Twitch runs and so we want to do our best to make this a good experience for the viewer, too. When we changed our policy and um allowed multiccasting, one of the provisions we included in the community guidelines was wording that prohibited um com um com prohibited shared chat. Now there are two reasons we had done this at the time. First, we didn't want any third parties building apps that would be um taking our chat and and using it elsewhere or injecting into the chat because of course the chat is a huge part of Twitch. The other issue in terms of putting it on screen was one of the concerns we had was that since we spend a fair amount of time um ensuring uh that we have lots of controls in terms of managing chat. If somebody comes into your chat and says something that's a violation of our community guidelines, we can suspend them and take action so that they can't keep doing that. we don't know what happens on other platforms and we were worried that it would become an attack vector basically to get people suspended from Twitch was to go and um do stuff in the chat on other platforms because in the end you're responsible what um uh is on that screen and it's UGC content in most cases we had not been proactively managing or policing putting combined chat on screen but it was the case that if a report was made then we were issuing warnings. So to be clear, we are updating our enforcement guidelines to make sure we are not issuing enforcement actions for integrating combined chat on the video from your stream just such as what happened with Gigok and what he was doing when he received the warning. Now it's important to note the streamer is still taking responsibility for what happens in the chat from thirdparty platforms since we don't control that. So sorry about the confusion. Thanks for the feedback.