Twitch Specials — A New Promotional Program for Unique Content Events

Over the last several months, we’ve been working more and more with our friends in the entertainment world — specifically those in the television and music industries — to provide new content experiences on Twitch.

For example, we partnered with Ultra, one of the biggest Electronic Music festivals in the world, to bring their live concerts straight to Twitch. We also worked with HBO to broadcast the season 1 pilot of Silicon Valley with an exclusive clip from season 2, and USA to debut their pilot episode of Mr. Robot.

We understand that for long-term members of the Twitch community, this can be a bit confusing. After all, Twitch is a site for gamers. It’s been our policy, with few exceptions, that Twitch is for games only. So you may be asking “Why?”

Twitch provides a uniquely engaging experience that has a lot to offer to the world outside of video games. You, the Twitch community, pioneered this social video experience and are therefore some of the most progressive consumers of entertainment in the world. When we’ve provided non-gaming content to date, the positive reaction has led to truly epic experiences, such as hours of dancing emojis. This type of engagement has sparked conversations with a variety of content producers who hope to embrace this new paradigm.

Enter “Twitch Specials.”

Twitch Specials is a new program we’ve created specifically for unique content events, like music festivals and show premieres. This is a promotional tool that carefully selected content partners and sponsoring brands can work with Twitch to broadcast their original programming. As part of this program, we anticipate curating a limited number of non-gaming events that we feel fit with the culture and passion of gamers.

Driving more revenue into the pockets of our broadcasters now and in the future is a very important goal of Twitch, thus Twitch Partners can sometimes benefit from a Twitch Specials promotion. In order to bring the content to you in a more familiar way, we‘ll often engage with a Partner(s) to facilitate non-gaming content event partnerships and paid sponsorship opportunities directly for them. Today, the number and size of these new types of opportunities for Partners may be very limited, but we hope to build on these early successes with the introduction of Twitch Specials promotional program.

We are dedicated to maintaining our policy regarding transparency in sponsored content and promotion. To that end, any Twitch Specials that are paid for will be clearly identified as “sponsored content” similar to any other sponsored program on Twitch.

We hope to continue working with forward-thinking content partners and brands in the entertainment space, and that you continue to enjoy the content we bring to you on their behalf. See below for the full press release, and check out http://twitchadvertising.tv/ for an overview of the program.

As always, we’d like to hear your feedback.