Twitch users who’ve gotten accustomed to hopping onto the platform and viewing videos just as they typically do each day were met with a surprise this week when they were greeted by an updated layout. This new layout is visible whenever you select a category that you want to watch be that Just Chatting or a specific game. Doing so shows a different way of viewing the various streamers participating in that category, but the part people have really taken issue with is the new autoplaying video that now takes up the majority of your screen.
Videos by ComicBook.com
To better see this new layout in action, head over to Twitch and select a category. Take Fall Guys, for example, a game which is enjoying a resurgence in popularity on Twitch now that it’s gone free-to-play and has come to other platforms. Selecting that category presented me with the screen showed in the image below which had xqc’s stream up first and autoplaying while a line of other streams filled the bottom row.
Up towards the top of the layout, there’s an option to move forward or back along the line of streams. There’s also an option to mute the stream seeing how the autoplay function applies to both the video itself and the audio, but everything’s on by default. If you sit on one stream for a while, it’ll pause and will present you with two options: “Continue to Stream” which will take you to that person’s stream or “Go to Next” which moves onto the next one. You can also expand the list of other streams shown at the bottom of the video, but only by one row.
Naysayers who don’t like this new layout have criticized Twitch for making the first video autoplay, a system which seems to be universally hated no matter the platform. Some have also suggested this is an ad play by Twitch to get people to view more ads, but after bouncing around to several categories and never being met with an ad from this stream preview, it seems that ads do not run there, or at least they don’t run enough to be an issue.
Others who are more optimistic like Lowco suggested that this new layout could be a positive change for smaller content creators who may get more exposure. While that could end up being the case, my experience with browsing the new category layouts showed the streamers with the top views in the preview window even though every category was sorted by “Recommended For You” (Lowco also said later that “sound is off by default,” but mine was automatically on each time, so who knows?).
Twitch has not made a big to-do about this layout change just yet, but we’ll probably see something said about it within the coming weeks to explain the change and talk about whether or not it’ll be sticking around.
