Such a popup actually makes me stop watching a stream.
You completely break sites like speedrunslive…
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How are we meant to host tournaments with multiple twitch embeds? The purple screen appears way too often and makes the embeds completely unreliable.
This experiment ruined a lot of things and we are now redirecting our players on our own RTMP server to avoid these purple screens of death.
What the fuck Twitch?
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That is the way you should run tournaments were you want to include other peoples video, as then you get the most flexibility to handle how you process and consume the content, without the twitch embed player controls getting in the way (lovely) or anything else occuring such as this experiement or other issues beyond your control that the platform may enforce.
A custom RTMP server (that may forward the ingest to the streamer/paritipants own channel or they send game only to the custom ingest and send the full shebang (overlays etc) to their channel), is potentially the more professional and maximum flexibility for a tournament or other eveny where you combine feeds, without having to rely on someone elses video pipeline, it can also reduce delay on your combined production on consumption of the content from the particpants, reducing desync when you cut between two players in the same game. For example.
Yes this is distruptive to your use case, but there is an argument to say that your use case shouldn’t be using embeds.
And please keep it civil on the forums. There is no need to throw swear words around please!
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We always used Twitch in the past for that and it was really smooth in every way.
Setting up a RTMP server can be really hard and sometimes expensive. Our community is relatively small and we just cannot invest that much for every tournament we host.
Controlling the Twitch Embed with Vue.js to make it show on a Browser Source is painless and really easy and now, I have to use a HTML5 player. It would’ve been 10x simpler if your experiment didn’t affect the embeds like right now.
I understand that it is a big market and a CTA can sometimes solve some issues but in this case, it ruins a lot of things especially for small communities willing to host tournaments.
I really hope that this option will be available to be turned off on the creators’ channel settings as it would make you all look bad in my opinion.
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Hi there, thanks for your additional feedback on this particular use case. For additional clarity, was the purple screen considered to be the more invasive part of the experience for your particular tournament? Was it clear that it would end after a certain period of time? There is additional information earlier in the thread, but that is an ad-experience solution that is different from but tangentially related to this experiment.
It is still our aim to use the info from this test to allow smaller communities to benefit from the ease of embed player implementation while also increasing more monetization and discovery opportunities for our creators. Again, thanks for your feedback and perspective.
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Yep, the purple screen was the most invasive part of the experience. It would clear after a short period of time but would return after a while.
Thanks for hearing me out. 
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No problem! That is technically expected behavior for the screen at this time. This will help for the immediate future with that implementation and for longer-term planning. Thanks!
BarryCarlyon:
Most of the people on this thread vary in size of traffic and use case, but uniformly no one would turn it on. Most want a option to disable it.
So, if it was opt-in, no one on this thread would opt in and then Twitch would have no data.
I would think very critically on these statements. If it was opt in and nobody would opt in unless we made it mandatory, that sounds to me like something nobody is asking for or wants in the first place.
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*Please note, I am not Twitch Staff. Your statement seems to suggest you think I am.
Apologies. I didn’t mean to suggest you were. I just think that to your point if this really is the rationale behind forcing it universally (nobody wants to take part otherwise), then that’s pretty telling in itself.
It’s also true, that for the most part the only people whom have posted on this thread, are either Twitch Staff, me sitting in the middle, or everyone who has a problem with this. The people that don’t have a problem, have not posted.
And theres also the addition of if it was an opt in test, there is no way to contact developers using embeds, since embeds don’t need a clientID, or any form of signup.
So Twitch has to go global, in order to get any test data. The test group also has to be a certain size across different usage cases to obtain any statistically significant data. So with a opt out option, people who just turn it off, and Twitch only gets Developer data, and no user/viewer data.
It’s also worth remembering that while those of us here that are developers may not opt-in to the experiment if that option were to exist, this is something that could improve the viewing experience of some end users if they click through to go to the broadcasters actual channel (data which they’d only get by trying this), and this may also improve the broadcasters interaction with their viewers as embeds don’t support extensions and there’s not always chat, so this could be beneficial for some broadcasters which again needs to be tested.
We may not like it, but if no developer that utilizes embeds opts-in, the success of this feature couldn’t be measured. So an opt-in system simply wouldn’t work, and an opt-out option would limit the data they would get.
That being said though, I do believe the experiment was poorly conceived and they could have easily put in place protections for those of us using embeds in a production environment where there’s only 1 viewer of the embed (the page being fed to the switcher) meaning there’s negligible monetisation benefits, and also there’s no possibility of clicking through to view on the main Twitch page, so there’s no benefit there either.
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I guess it must be nice to work somewhere so big you can just intentionally break tons of your users sites at their expense and without warning purely for the sake of “gathering data so we can make more money” – and then provide zero options to all those you screwed over nor even offer them a timeframe or roadmap. I guess it’s to be expected that ethics go out the window when you work for nearly the biggest corporation on Earth.
So with a opt out option, people who just turn it off, and Twitch only gets Developer data, and no user/viewer data.
In any product experiment I’ve done in my career – wherein it was expected there’d be some users/customers that’d find it problematic and demand to be removed from it – we have always been ready with a way to opt-out on request and that metric was generally considered among the most important of them all.
In the few exceptions I can recall where a direct opt-out wasn’t provided, feedback was addressed immediately and sometimes we would cancel the experiment entirely if a customer brought to us a critically broken use case for which we had no alternative quick fix (which most of this thread would fall under).
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They couldn’t reach out to specific developers, but what if they just sent out a tweet that said “Hey developers, we’re trying to develop new features for embedded streams. How do you use embedded streams? Would it ruin your users’ experience if there were intrusive popups over the center of the content?”
They also could’ve added the feature in a way that you’re opted in by default, but let the developers opt out of it, and then track how many devs opt out to determine if anyone likes the feature, or to indicate that your research missed a popular use case for embeds that this feature is damaging.
Same problem.
Not all developers follow any of TwitchDev / Twitch / TwitchSupport on Twitter and/or will see if the Tweet is sent out at a “sensible” US Time, or even if that Tweet is repeated at four hourly intervals or something
Not all developers even subscribe to notifications for the Announcements topic on this forum.
More people are aware of this test due to the Tweets some other people have made and cross posted to /r/Twitch Reddit.
I already suggested an answer to that one
There would also be people who just turn it off, just for the sake of it, when they see threads like this where it’s uniformly negative, as only the effected people post, people who don’t have a problem don’t post.
As they may fear viewer/user backlash, when the whole point of their embed is to transition users to the stream, (even if some people choose to stay on the site).
(There would also be people who just turn it off) when their use case actually makes sense for a more obvious call to action to move from the embed to the main site. (How many viewers install BTTV/FFZ coz a given chat room tells them to, then do nothing more than perhaps turn on gif emotes and use none of the other tools, a case of monkey see monkey do)
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I’m not sure I’d call his use case “unique”. Speedrunslive.com’s homepage is a very similar case. It gives you a list of live speedrun streams and embeds one of the higher-viewer streams at the top by default to try to get you to check out a new speedrunner. It also embeds chat, and if you hover over the stream you can follow, subscribe, or click the title to be taken to Twitch and check out their channel description or VODs or whatever. In my eyes, I’m already getting the “full [streamer name] experience” that your popup describes, and the popup only serves to damage the experience I get by watching on SRL.
The embedded stream on SRL isn’t the focus of the web site, just a bonus, so it’s easy to just skip past the featured stream and go find a race to join if the stream doesn’t auto-play uninterrupted. The streamer’s only got a few seconds to catch my interest before I move on, and you’re making it harder with this feature.
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Thanks for your feedback here, particularly with regard to your recognition of the various other clickthrough points in the player and the CTA copy. This will be helpful in understanding the impact of the experiment in regard to discovery on/off Twitch and how to more effectively convey the ways that embeds can/should support viewers, creators, and developers. Fair point on the usage of “unique” in that reply, as that is a somewhat standard application of the embed, as I meant in that case to convey that it was unique as in singular. That could be confusing, so I can edit for clarity.
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Since I also use SRL, I’ll have to throw in a slightly different viewpoint here:
I agree that the CTA is VERY annoying and destroying the experience when you are watching a Race on their Website, where multiple Streams are embedded so you can see who is ahead or behind - this is an enhanced experience you don’t get on Twitch!
However, the “basic” Discovery on the Main Page is, in my opinion exactly where the CTA and limited access/time in the Embed makes absolute sense: You discovered a streamer through the website - great! You had some time to check them out in that frame or reference and enjoyed it enough to stay for a while. It makes absolute sense to be redirected to Twitch for you to continue watching, especially since on SRL, you do not get Extensions, etc., which are part of “The Full Experience”, including the Panels of the streamer, where you can more often then not also find our more about them, including their Personal Best Times in Speedruns (usually).
You are missing out on these by watching on SRL instead of Twitch. You enjoyed their content for a while and should check out the experience the Runner intends for you to watch, not the reference frame SRL gives.
To complete this post with another opinion:
I myself do use SRL. I have had a very few people find me through it. I know that the SRL website is (sadly, relatively) poorly maintained with its fair share of issues. I most definitely want people to watch me on Twitch, not on SRL. I do use Extensions and know how my content appears on Twitch and that is the experience I want my viewers to have.
Edit/Afterhtought: I personally would prefer my viewers to get the CTA after 10 minutes, once or twice. Not in the form of the recurring purple screen - that one is disruptive. The dismissable modal i approve of in this very usecase.
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I have created a site for my group Xbox Playdates where it is a team playing games together with the community, with multiple people streaming. Since there is no way to group the streams together on Twitch, I have done so on our website.
The team has the main stream which is a full embed of the stream and chat, while there are video only embeds of the other team members that only show if they are live, using the API. This would be very disruptive in any fashion for the Playdates group streams, where this popup would be whack-a-mole for the three to five streams I have on the page, with popups periodically appearing on each stream.
I would prefer to not have any popups, where if they wanted to go to twitch, they could click the link of the anything in the embed already and go to twitch. I’m not sure how this is any actual improvement to any user on the platform unless it appears once on load and is able to be removed.
Honestly, if you dismiss it, how is bringing it back up in a few minutes anything short of annoying to anyone? It is a road trip with a child asking, “Are we there yet?”.
Hi Twitch, can you stop the embed experiment? We are many streamers who are being affected when we insert your embed in our site, Otherwise, we would need to find an alternative to twitch that does not cause this problem. Best regards!!