Twitch has created specific filters so that Hearthstone and Overwatch fans will be able to find streams of their favorite hero or favorite game mode a lot easier than before, according to an announcement on the Twitch official blog.
Overwatch fans will be able to filter through hundreds of streams to find their favorite hero of the game and watch a player use them in combat, and Hearthstone fans will be able to filter streams by both hero class and game mode. Not only can Hearthstone fans find their favorite hero class, but they can find specific game modes that they may be interested in watching.
Streamers don’t have to do anything specific to add their streams to the filter, as Twitch will be using AI technology to read the game and find out what hero or game mode the streamer is in.
“Instead, we’re using computer vision and machine learning technology to figure out what’s going on in your game. As you stream to Twitch, we analyze and categorize the video in just-about-real-time (with some minor delays that you might notice if a streamer switches heroes mid-match in Overwatch),” said Noreen McInnis, who does product marketing at Twitch in the announcement.
The filtering option, though, wasn’t Twitch’s own invention. This was made possible by ClipMine, a company that Twitch has recently acquired.
“Their Deep Learning based video indexing platform lets us automatically translate visual information into video metadata, which roughly translates to,’keep your eyes peeled for even more slick updates soon,'” said McInnis in the announcement.
Twitch discussed this newest filtering system in more detail through a press release.
“When we recently introduced metadata filtering options for one of our top esports games, we not only received positive reception from its fans, but demand from the greater community to have access to similar discovery tools for other titles,” said JT Gleason, the director of integration success at Twitch about the Overwatch and Hearthstone filtering system. “Since Overwatch and Hearthstone are also among our most popular competitive games whose players take to Twitch to improve their skills by watching others play, we focused on how we can improve discovery for them. Our new metadata filters now make it easy to find more granular aspects of gameplay that previously required a lot more searching.”
This news comes after Twitch and Blizzard first announced that they would be collaborating together (Overwatch and Hearthstone are both Blizzard IPs), where Twitch will get exclusive third-party streaming rights to future Blizzard tournaments. Before, Blizzard would only stream these tournaments to their website, but by adding the ability to also watch on Twitch, now they may be able to pull in more Twitch-specific viewers.
It seems that this is another sign of the two gaming titans’ collaboration, with added filters so that players can look through hundreds of streams to find exactly what they may want to watch. Twitch streamers and viewers will be receiving more updates about the upcoming filtering system soon.
This is definitely an interesting approach to both Overwatch and Hearthstone streams, which have made their home on the Twitch platform. Also, it’s cool to see the continuous collaboration between Twitch and Blizzard, who are both well-known in the gaming industry. I can’t wait to see any future projects the two will be coming up with later on, and they are truly giving their fans new things to look forward to. I hope that Twitch will announce more additions to this filtering system in the future (earlier this year, League of Legends were added to the filtering system).
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.
