Sunday, October 25, 2020

Can you lose affiliate

Becoming a Twitch Affiliate is a big achievement for any content creator on the platform. It provides numerous benefits such as the ability to earn revenue through subscriptions, ads, and donations. However, many streamers are unaware that this status can be lost if certain rules are broken. In this article, we'll discuss whether it's possible to lose your Twitch Affiliate status and the reasons behind it.


The simple answer is yes, it's possible to lose your Twitch Affiliate status. Once you've achieved this status, you need to maintain it by following Twitch's terms of service and your affiliate agreement. Twitch's rules are in place to ensure a safe and positive environment for everyone on the platform. Failure to follow these rules can result in the loss of your affiliate status.

There are various reasons why you might lose your Twitch Affiliate status. The most common one is breaking the rules listed in the terms of service and the affiliate agreement. Twitch's terms of service cover various areas such as harassment, hate speech, nudity, and sexual content. If you're found to have violated any of these rules, your affiliate status could be revoked. It's essential to familiarize yourself with Twitch's terms of service and abide by them to avoid losing your affiliate status.

Another reason why you might lose your Twitch Affiliate status is by being inactive for 12 months. If you haven't streamed on your channel for a year, Twitch may recycle your channel name, which means you'll lose both your name and your affiliate status. To avoid this, you should try to maintain a consistent streaming schedule, even if it's only for a few hours each week.

In conclusion, becoming a Twitch Affiliate is a significant milestone for content creators on the platform. However, it's important to remember that it's not a permanent status, and you can lose it if you break the rules listed in the terms of service or become inactive for 12 months. As long as you follow Twitch's rules and maintain an active streaming schedule, you can keep your affiliate status and continue to reap the benefits that come with it.
Monday, October 19, 2020

Who owns twitch

Who Owns Twitch in 2026? Amazon, CEO, Prime Gaming & How Twitch Technology Powered Amazon IVS

If you are a gamer or streamer, you have probably heard of Twitch.tv. But many people still do not realize that Twitch is actually owned by Amazon.

In this fully updated 2026 guide, we explain exactly who owns Twitch, how the acquisition happened, who runs the company today, the major benefits that come from the Amazon partnership, and one of the most important but lesser-known outcomes: how Twitch’s advanced streaming technology helped Amazon build its own live streaming service called Amazon IVS.

prime gaming

Twitch Ownership: Still Amazon in 2026

Amazon acquired Twitch on August 25, 2014 for $970 million in cash. Since then, Twitch has remained a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon with no change in ownership.

The deal gave Amazon one of the biggest live streaming platforms in the world and created powerful synergies between Twitch and Amazon services.

Current Leadership & Company Size

Twitch is currently led by CEO Dan Clancy, who took over the role in March 2023. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California and employs thousands of people worldwide.

Under Amazon ownership and Dan Clancy’s leadership, Twitch has continued to grow while staying focused on live streaming, creator tools, and community features.

How Twitch’s Streaming Technology Helped Build Amazon IVS

One of the biggest strategic reasons Amazon bought Twitch was its world-class live streaming infrastructure. Twitch had spent over a decade perfecting low-latency global streaming technology.

In July 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS). This is a fully managed live streaming service that lets any developer or business quickly add high-quality, low-latency live video to their apps or websites.

Amazon IVS uses the exact same technology and global infrastructure that powers Twitch. Official AWS documentation and announcements repeatedly state that IVS is built directly on Twitch’s proven streaming technology.

This means:

  • Businesses, brands, educators, and other platforms can now use Twitch-level streaming without having to build the complex infrastructure themselves.
  • IVS powers many other live streaming services (including competitors to Twitch).
  • It delivers low latency (under 3 seconds in standard mode, or under 300 milliseconds in real-time mode).
  • The technology scales to millions of viewers globally.

This is a major hidden benefit of the Amazon acquisition. Twitch’s decade of innovation in live video delivery was packaged into a public AWS product that generates revenue for Amazon while continuing to support Twitch itself.

Prime Gaming: The Biggest Benefit of Amazon Ownership

One of the strongest connections between Twitch and Amazon is Prime Gaming (formerly Twitch Prime).

Amazon Prime members get these free benefits every month on Twitch:

  • A free monthly channel subscription to any streamer you choose (supports creators directly)
  • Free PC games you can keep forever
  • In-game loot and cosmetics for many popular titles
  • Exclusive chat emotes and badges
  • Extended VOD storage (60 days instead of 14 days for non-Prime members)

Prime Gaming remains one of the most popular perks for both viewers and streamers in 2026.

Final Thoughts

Twitch is still fully owned by Amazon more than 11 years after the acquisition. The partnership has brought real value to the platform through Prime Gaming and other integrations. Most importantly, Twitch’s advanced streaming technology was turned into Amazon IVS, making professional-grade live streaming available to developers and businesses worldwide.

Whether you are a casual viewer, a streamer, or an Amazon Prime member, the connection between Twitch and Amazon continues to shape the future of live streaming.

Have questions about Prime Gaming, Amazon IVS, or Twitch features? Drop them in the comments below and I will help you out.

Saturday, October 17, 2020

4,633,479 followers in one day....

How did a channel get 4,633,479 followers in one day on Twitch?

So Twitch has been having a lot of issues for the past couple of months with massive amounts of follow bots.  On August 19, 2020 a channel received the biggest amount of followers in one day on Twitch. Over 4.6 million follows which is a record for sure but unfortunately they are all bots.


Curious minds need to ask how is this even possible to occur on the platform? How can the system allow for 4.6 million accounts to all be able to follow one channel in one day with out setting some sort of alarm? Are these hacked twitch accounts that are being used?

We need some update on this from Twitch, hopefully we can get some sort of news in the not so distant future.  I purposely left the channel name out of this posting because they appear to be randomly targeted by whoever or whatever runs this follow bot operation.

A similar event happened a while ago with ASMR streamers which was posted here a couple of months ago. The stream that was affected was able to get the follow bots removed after a period of time. Hopefully this channel gets the same with Twitch investigating and removing the bot followers.
Monday, October 5, 2020

How to change the font size for twitch chat

If you need to make the chat room font size bigger, twitch has just added that option! Here is our quick guide on how to adjust the text size in twitch chat.

Step 1:

You can change the font size by going to the chat settings. Click on the gear icon located next to the purple chat button.

chat settings gearbox

Step 2:

A pop up window will show with an option called "Chat Appearance", click on that preference.



Step 3:

Once you enter the chat appearance section, they will have a slider bar that lets you make the font bigger or smaller. It will show you a preview of how the font size will look just above the bar. Two additional options are also listed under the bar that lets you show a timestamp and another that makes the font colors into a readable

font slider bar

Thursday, September 17, 2020

How to reset your dashboard using these simple steps!

So today I found myself looking at my twitch dashboard being all messed up.  They seem to have added a new panel called "Ad Manager" which then changed the default layout.  Here is how to fix it by using these simple steps.

Step 1

Go to your dashboard and then click on the pencil icon located on the top left of the screen.

Edit dashboard layout


Step 2

In the new panel that pops up on the side called "Edit Stream Manager Layout", click on the reset to default button and then accept.

Edit stream manager layout

Once you accept the change to revert back to default layout, it should be how it was before today's change. You can also customize the layout by clicking the add button to the panels you want to add. Also can rearrange the location of the panels by holding your left mouse button on the title section of the panel and dragging it to where you want it.

Monday, August 24, 2020

How to grow your youtube channel which then becomes a traffic generator for your stream!

Here are the biggest take away tips that I have uncovered from researching what makes youtuber's content more popular. I am going to keep this as simple as possible to save time. The general consensus is to replicate what other youtuber's have already done that is successful. They have discovered what the algorithm likes so you can copycat it.

growing your youtube

Go look at a certain game, lets say Overwatch, find the biggest youtubers in that category and see their video feed.

  • Check all their video titles
  • Examine the thumbnails and how they placed the words, game characters and logos.
  • Check the tags they are using on each video

Then replicate the same style, wording, thumbnails for whatever game you are going to primarily focus on. The game you are going to primarily in needs to be popular or trending in the general time frame that you are going to be creating and uploading videos onto youtube.  Older game titles or non trendy games can work but generally only work once your channel is already established with a high subscriber base.

  • Colors in your thumbnail matter
  • Facial Expressions in thumbnails also matter, that's why you see so many personality types with their mouths open like they are surprised.  This is all a marketing tactic gone overblown on youtube but work to draw in people who are browsing.
  • Emotional based storytelling also very powerful

Another suggestion which is the core to building on just about any platform is to create content based on answering questions.  Find out what people are searching on for you niche and answer those questions.

  • Use the ABC method and see what youtube autocompletes for ideas
  • Example, go to youtube and type overwatch a  and see what the autocomplete show, then do overwatch b, and then overwatch c and so forth.

The ABC method will give you keywords of what exactly people are searching for on youtube.  Find which of these keywords produce the most amount of traffic and start to create video content based on answering that query.

User engagement is also a key factor in ranking your videos higher. One of the best examples is how black hat type watch a video fully and then rewatch it over again by dragging the view location indicator back to the start. Why would you think people do this? Well its because it will show to google that the watch time from a single viewer is 200% instead of 100%. And if you can replicate this x100 or "x" number times it will generally get your videos to always rank in the top spot for that keyword topic. Watch time engagement is more powerful then likes or comments but don't discount that from the mix. Every little bit counts and the more organic engagement that you can generatate per video the better.

Make sure to include your streaming channel link in the description or on a pin comment.  There is also on spot in the video channel page that allows you to insert links. Fill that out with your stream links, website and social media.

youtube channel page links

Any questions or comments about this guide? Fill free to post in the comments section below.  This is a preliminary guide which will be updated again in the future as ecosystem changes. Make sure to bookmark and share this out if you found it useful on social media, forums, discord etc.

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Whats the current bitrate cap for streams?

The current bitrate recommendation for twitch streams is 6000 kbps. You can go higher to about 8000 kbps but risk getting source disabled if it becomes an issue on the network. Here are more details on various resolutions and bitrate settings for you to use on your channel.

x264 or Nvidia NVENC Encoding

  • 1080p60
    • Resolution: 1920 x 1080
    • Framerate: 60, 59.94, 50
    • Bitrate: 6000 kbps
    • Audio Bitrate: 128 kbps
  • 1080p30
    • Resolution: 1920 x 1080
    • Framerate: 30, 29.97
    • Bitrate: 6000 kbps or 4500 kbps
    • Audio Bitrate: 128 kbps
  • 720p60
    • Resolution: 1280 x 720
    • Framerate: 60, 59.94, 50
    • Bitrate: 6000 kbps
    • Audio Bitrate: 128 kbps
  • 720p30
    • Resolution: 1280 x 720
    • Framerate: 30, 29.97
    • Bitrate: 6000 kbps or 4500 kbps
    • Audio Bitrate: 128 kbps
  • Rate Control: CBR
  • Keyframe Interval: 2 seconds
  • Preset
    • x264
      • Very fast to Slow
      • For this setting test out how far you can go with slow being the best but requires a lot of cpu power. If you set it to slow preset and notice your cpu spiking over 80%, it cant handle it, try medium, then fast, and lastly very fast.
    • Nvenc
      • Quality
  • Profile: Main/High
  • B-frames: 2

For OBS Users
Here are some screenshots showing the various location in settings that you need to update for resolution and bitrate.

Output settings for obs

In the output tab under settings for OBS, you can configure the video bitrate, encoder and audio bitrate.


Video settings for obs

For video resolution and fps configuration its under the video tab in the settings on obs.


Here is a bitrate recommendation chart based on game type that I created a couple of years ago that still applies today.

High motion / FPS / First person games
Medium motion / RTS Games, usually has scrolling
Low motion / static action, turn based games
Bitrate chart for game types

Note the colors and what bitrate is recommend for the game type. For some games with high action, we still do not have enough bitrate to stream at 1080p60 at very high quality.