TwitchCon San Diego, Twitch’s three-day convention for streamers and their communities, opened November 13 at the San Diego Convention Center with programming that runs through November 15. Southwest Airlines is the presenting sponsor, with Honda, REESE’S, AMD and Roblox among the brands on the floor.
Twitch used the Opening Ceremony to announce a series of product updates, including Clips of up to five minutes, the return of Hosting and collectible emotes, according to a company blog post and an announcement sent to press.
Clips and Recaps
Twitch is working to extend the maximum length of Clips from 60 seconds to five minutes and will let streamers combine multiple short Clips into one. Streamers and their editors will also be able to upload videos created outside a livestream as Clips, such as teasers for upcoming events. A new timeline on past broadcasts will highlight moments when Chat activity or Hype Trains spiked, making it faster to find sections worth clipping.
The company said views in the Clips feed have doubled since January, while follows from the feed have increased by more than a third. More than 400,000 channels have published a Recap in the two weeks since Twitch relaunched “Stream Recaps”. Recaps will also appear on category pages, and streamers will soon be able to designate trusted clippers whose Clips are added to a Recap automatically. In October, the company began letting partner companies promote Recap clips on Instagram and YouTube.
Hosting and Streaming Tools
Hosting, which Twitch retired in October 2022, will return in testing later this year. The feature lets streamers show another live channel on their own page while they are offline, and the new version combines both communities in a single Chat with messages labeled by channel. Twitch is also experimenting with “Host Trains,” a rotating lineup of hosted channels on a timer, and plans “Auto Raids” for streamers who forget to raid manually at the end of a stream.
Creators will be able to stream directly from a browser with alerts, a Chat overlay and built-in scenes. “Stream Rewind,” which lets viewers pause and rewind a live stream, will expand from subscribers and Turbo users to all viewers.
Community Rewards
“Legendary Emotes” are collectible versions of global emotes including Kappa, LUL and PogChamp across four rarity levels. Viewers earn them through Emote Chests unlocked by Watch Streaks or Subs. The feature is in a limited alpha and will reach viewers in the U.S. and Germany on all monetizing channels in the next few weeks.
Twitch is also testing “Piñata,” in which viewers use Bits, Subs and Gift Subs to break open an on-stream piñata that gives everyone watching an emote for 24 hours. Custom Power-Ups, introduced in May, will add text-to-speech and support for GIFs, videos and sounds.
According to the company, 49 million viewers have earned Drops across more than 7,500 campaigns so far in 2026, up 31% in viewer participation from last year. That activity has contributed to more than $12 million in streamer payouts.
‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Launch Plans
Twitch will mark the release of “Grand Theft Auto VI” with themed Sub emotes and badges, “Heist Trains” featuring emotes designed by streamer LumpyTouch, and daily game code giveaways from launch through November 30. An October report from Open World Research found that 69% of PC and console gamers plan to play the game at release.
Twitch has not given release dates for five-minute Clips, browser streaming or the wider rollout of Stream Rewind. The company reported more than 8.6 billion hours of gaming content watched on the platform between January and September. TwitchCon San Diego will return October 8-10, 2027, Twitch said, and the next TwitchCon Europe is scheduled for Berlin on May 22-23, 2027.
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