Minecraft Broadcasting Now in Open Beta

At MINECON 2013, we announced that integrated Twitch broadcasting was coming soon to one of the most popular games in the world, Minecraft. Today, we’re pleased to report that Mojang has released this feature into open beta as part of its experimental snapshots program. All Minecraft owners have access to this open beta, but you’ll need to setup a few things before you can try it out.

Update #2: Currently, Twitch for Minecraft only supports Windows (Vista and later) and Mac OS X (10.8, 10.9). Linux support is currently not planned due to licensing issues surrounding the encoding software. Apologies for not including this information in the original post.

First, you’ll need to visit your Mojang account and connect it to your Twitch account. To do this, visit https://account.mojang.com/me/settings. If you’re like me and you have an ancient Minecraft account that is not connected to the Mojang website, you’ll need to convert that to the new hotness. After you’re done with that, proceed to Account > Settings and select the option to connect to Twitch and follow the prompts.

Once you’ve done that, go ahead and open your Minecraft launcher. Once loaded, select the “New Profile” option in the bottom-left hand corner. On the new profile dialogue box, the only option you need to change is “Enable experimental development snapshots.” Go and and check that box.

From there, go ahead and save this new profile, then select it from the profile menu in the bottom-left hand corner. You should then notice the launcher has changed your version of Minecraft to, “Ready to play Minecraft 13w47c,” above the “Log Out” button. From here, all you have to do is hit the giant “Play” button.

Now that you’ve on the experimental snapshot, either load up an existing game of Minecraft, or start a new one. Once in game, hit the escape key to pull up the menu, and you should notice a new option called “Broadcast Settings” under the options menu.

Currently, Twitch for Minecraft supports up to 3500Kbps for streaming and utilizes your default microphone. The most compelling feature at the moment would be the chat integration, which pulls chat directly from your Twitch channel and into Minecraft. The best part of this feature is that you don’t even have to streaming using the integration to utilize this feature, meaning that if you’d like, you can use a third-party broadcasting solution, yet still see your Twitch chat in-game.

Now that you’re all set up, you’re ready to begin broadcasting. The controls hotkeys for Twitch’s Minecraft integration are as follows:

F6: Start/Stop Stream F7: Pause/Unpause Stream F8: Show Commercials (Partners)

As always we appreciate your thoughts and feedback, and we’re looking forward to improving this feature in the future. For more thoughts on Twitch for Minecraft, check out this reddit thread started by popular Twitch broadcaster, Sevadus, as he lays out what it means from the perspective of a long-time Minecraft broadcaster.