“Chat on Videos” feature expanding to all videos

Twitch is a wonderful live platform (haven’t you heard?), but even the most hardcore stream fans can’t be online all the time. Luckily, Past Broadcasts and Highlights are an excellent way to catch up on the exciting moments you missed out on, like big plays, hilarious mistakes, and amazing community moments.

Back in May, we brought the chat experience to uploads — letting you view and leave time-stamped chat messages on uploaded videos. Today, we’re starting to expand that functionality to all videos, including Past Broadcasts and Highlights.

Chat Replay was the first step in letting viewers who watch later experience the interactive excitement of chat, but it was still a passive experience. This is true interactivity for non-live videos. And with it, missing out will become a thing of the past for Twitch viewers.

So, how does it work? Before, when you’d watch Past Broadcasts and Highlights, you’d follow along with the excitement through Chat Replay, but now, when you find the moment you absolutely, positively must comment on, you’ll be able to do so using the familiar chat box where you can enter your time-stamped message. Boom.

If you’re a purist who only wants to see messages in chat from the original live stream, we’re not standing in your way. You can filter out new messages via the settings cog.

For streamers, these messages won’t be a pain to control or moderate either. Tools in your dashboard will allow you to manage and reply to them easily. Viewers will also be notified when you reply to their messages, so the conversation will never stop just because something got lost.

This feature will be rolling out over the next couple of days. For a detailed guide, visit our help article here.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on this and other products via the Twitch server or UserVoice.

FAQs

Does this mean I’ll be able to Cheer on Past Broadcasts and Highlights?

Cheering will technically work, but unfortunately the animated emotes won’t display and the Cheer will show up as plain text. We plan on providing more updates on this very soon, so stay tuned!

I’m a mod. What notifications will I receive for messages left on Past Broadcasts and Highlights for channels I mod?

By default, you’ll receive on-site notifications for these messages. If you’d like to turn them off, you can do so from your Settings page in the top-right drop-down and unchecking “A video from a channel I moderate has messages” in the “On Twitch” section.

I’m a streamer. What settings are there for me to help manage this?

The default setting is to allow all messages on videos except for those caught by AutoMod, but you can also hold all messages for manual review. There’s also a setting to completely disable all messages on videos that can be accessed via your Dashboard Settings > Moderation.