Today is StreamJar’s first birthday

On September 1st 2015, we sent out the first batch of keys for StreamJar’s Closed Beta. Back then, StreamJar was much simpler. Our donation platform was finally released into the wild, and our overlay consisted of about five different possible elements, all on one scene.

It’s been a year since then, and StreamJar has grown massively. We’ve seen a full site redesign, four new overlay elements, a giveaway system, a Discord integration, a Twitter integration, and dozens of site-wide features and improvements. We’ve come a long way since giving out the first few beta keys, and we’re incredibly thankful to everyone who has brought us this far. It’s unbelievable to think that StreamJar grew from such a small donation platform with a dozen users, to a full suite of streamer tools with nearly 5,000 users.

Before we first started coding the very basics of StreamJar, one of the first things we said was…

“I mean, it can’t be that hard to do.”

It turned out to be a little bit harder than that, but we’re still enjoying every moment of it. After we started, when we saw Beam’s lovely Browse page filled with streams decorated with StreamJar’s overlay for the very first time, we realized we were on to something.

We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone; there’s no way we could be where we are now without all the support we have received.

So, what’s next for StreamJar?

New features have been fairly sporadic over the last month or two, and that’s because we’ve been channeling the majority of our efforts towards getting the next version of StreamJar ready to try. StreamJar has been completely rewritten from the ground up, with many important changes. We’ve been working on this version for about 9 months now, and we finally feel like it’s ready for testing. I think you’ll like it.

To celebrate our birthday, we’re bringing this version into an optional, public beta.

Here are the main differences

• Brand new user interface.
  The control panel has been entirely redesigned. It now looks much more more modern and much more beautiful, written with Angular. It’s been built with the idea that you should be able to manage almost every aspect of your stream in a single place. It’s much faster, and easier for streamers to work with.
• Brand new back-end and API.
  Our API has been entirely re-written to make it more stable. We’re now using a different database engine, and we have a completely different server setup that we hope will make the back-end much more solid.
• Give people access to your StreamJar account.
  This has been requested since the beginning, and we’re finally happy to say it’s now possible to give partial access to your StreamJar account to someone else. Ever wanted to give a moderator access to your viewer settings? Or wanted to give a designer access to just your overlay editor? Or just wanted to help manage multiple channels? You can do that now.
• Now includes a fully-featured chat bot.
  When StreamJar began, the @StreamJar user that sits in your channel could only do one thing: announce tips. Since then we added follow alerts, sub alerts, host alerts, triggers, chat integration, etc. It became more complex, and it got to the point where our current bot was getting more and more difficult to scale. That’s why we’ve put a huge amount of effort into implementing a fully-featured, stable chat bot into StreamJar, so you can now do everything you would expect a chat bot to do within StreamJar. This takes us one step closer to being a truly all-in-one solution for your stream. And if you already use an awesome chat bot, that’s perfectly fine too — this bit is completely optional.
• Your channel now gets its own website
  Every StreamJar channel now receives its own website that we hope will contain everything viewers would ever need to know about your stream, including things like your tips page, giveaway information (if you have giveaways enabled), and commands (if you have the chat bot enabled). Your tip page has been redesigned, and we now have a much better drag-and-drop system for placing, moving and resizing widgets on your tip page. We hope to expand this site even further in the future.

How do I try it?

Please be aware that this is, currently, a very early optional beta, and so please expect some bugs to crop up. If you want to switch over to the new version, please click the “birthday present” icon (see what we did there?) in the top-right of your StreamJar control panel. You’ll be guided through the rest.

We’ll move all your StreamJar data over, including things like tips, your overlay scenes, your payment settings, your registered platforms, and your tip page layout. Additionally, if you already have a BlipBot account or a StreamJar Alpha account, we’ll move things like your viewers’ points and Interactive configuration from there. If you don’t have a BlipBot or StreamJar Alpha account, we’ll leave the chat bot option (commands, interactive, etc.) disabled unless you choose to turn it on from the Settings section.

Don’t worry about your tip page or overlay URLs; we’ll redirect them.

If you have any problems, spot any bugs, or have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to shoot us a message. We now have a super cool support button you can use to quickly get in contact with us. (It’s the floating purple speech bubble thing; hope that helps.)

Don’t forget we also have a community Discord server over at https://streamjar.tv/discord where staff and other StreamJar users are there to chat and help.