Potential leak shows Twitch may introduce pinned chats and channels

Streaming giant Twitch may plan on expanding its user interface both for streamers and viewers by introducing pinned chats and channels, as tweeted by Zach Bussey, who normally tweets about Twitch news.

For the streamer side, both livestreamers and channel moderators would be able to pin comments at the top of the chat sidebar. Either moderators or streamers would be able to pin their own comments or comments of other chatters. In the example image, pinned comments will only appear at the top of the chat for an allotted amount of time before the top section is cleared.

This may be useful in conveying information to a particularly fast-moving chat so that the same message does not have to be repeated either by the streamer or in text form.

For Twitch viewers, users will soon be able to pin their favorite channels to the ‘Followed Channels’ sidebar. These selected channels will remain permanently at the top of users’ sidebars until they are unpinned, above other unpinned channels. As it stands, users will only be allowed to pin up to three channels.

The ‘Followed Channels’ sidebar typically ranks creator by their current viewer count, so this upcoming tool could be useful in quickly accessing favorite channels which may not rank at the top of this list.

Twitch’s ever-changing user interface has seen the coming and going of many features. While recently removing the friends functionality and similar features, the website has made way for other highly anticipated functions such as pinned chats and channels.

As Twitch has not responded to this and there is no confirmation that this will take place, it is only speculation. Bussey is well respected for his Twitch news, so we expect it to have a bit more weight than the average Tweeter.