Comparing alerts on Twitch

Alerts amplify the goals of viewer interaction, audiovisual experience, social interaction, and personalization on your live stream. A lot of words to describe they are awesome and absolutely indispensable. In this article, I will compare the current standard, and our motivation to make a change.

TLDR

Creators use custom or platform-provided animations which are repetitive and StreamAlerts.TV is empowering its designs with a game engine, enabling new creative solutions that reward loyal viewers.

Current Alerts

Creators have alerts to notify and acknowledge an interaction on their channel. This way, the attention goes to that viewer, and their support doesn’t go unnoticed. Most interactions are payments like subscriptions and donations, or through redeemed channel points collected over time and of course, a new follower which is free and only requires a registered Twitch account.

The current alerts are repetitive animations. They contain an image, gif, or video provided by a platform directly or bought separately. The last requires manual installation, and creators go to considerable lengths to enhance their personal brand, including commissioning artists for custom designs. Twitch alerts can be part of a complete design package that has a cohering overlay theme.

Broadcasting platforms like StreamElements and StreamLabs are also supporting the creators with dashboards. Allowing the creator to monitor/manage the alerts, and importantly they work with payment service providers like PayPal. The default services don’t support this, although Twitch is experimenting with SuperCheers.

The key takeaway: the current alerts are repetitive. You can have multiple variations, but they repeat the same actions as you have installed them. They aren’t adaptable, reactive, or have physical attributions like for example an object in a game.

Let’s say you are playing the latest Zelda game, and a new sub would throw a vase through the screen, the sound and impact of breaking the vase to reveal its content (the subs name) would be impractical if done as an animation, and making variations would require a lot of work. This also means, that a 5x gifted subs will do the same animation five times, or an anniversary streak (subscribing 12 months in a row) doesn’t feel like a celebrative achievement, as it is the same animation as a regular sub.

So how are we resolving the repetitive behaviour of the current alerts on Twitch, and why should creators change them?

StreamAlerts.TV

Our focus is to reward loyal viewers that have supported your streaming journey. We hope to achieve that by designing alerts that are noticeable and unique for every new subscriber. Because our alerts are designed using the Unity game engine, it allows us to design the behaviour of an object the way a game would do. We can throw a vase, catapult it, or rocket launch it in any direction, make it explode, bounce, shatter or anything you think of.

The alert experience can be based on the value (tier 1, prime etc.) and the quantities can be based on the ongoing streaks and/or gifted subs. So continuing the Zelda vases example, 12 months in a row can be an abnormally large vase, exploding into 12 smaller vases. Or Prime could show a distinctive purple vase with a white crown as decoration. You could do a “destroyed vase counter” instead of a sub counter. Those selective viewers with a founders’ badge would be delighted to spawn 40 months' worth of vases!

So, embrace the power of stream alerts as it's been the same for 10 years, if you also believe that viewers want to experience some cool shit again! Enhance your cohesive Twitch overlay, try our free alert or entice a full screen of balloons during your stream anniversary with our birthday alert.