Twitch Gets New Features and Dedicated PlayStation Apps

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear announced all kinds of changes coming to the video game streaming service, and PlayStation consoles are finally getting their own set of dedicated viewing apps.

Polygon reports that the Twitch viewing app will be hitting PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and PS Vita this fall. You'll be able to watch all kinds of streams (including PC and Xbox streams) with full chat support. We should note that the PlayStation 4 has had Twitch-streaming capabilities since its late 2013 launch. Unfortunately, there has been no direct way to watch Twitch streams on PlayStation consoles until these apps launch. PlayStation 4 owners were kind of able to watch Twitch streams via the console's web browser, but that doesn't sound like any fun.

This announcement was made during TwitchCon's keynote address made by Emmett Shear, who also revealed all kinds of upgrades coming to Twitch itself. Messages/whispers are being improved. The video format is fully changing from Flash to HTML5 (thank goodness), and a new playlist system is being added that'll go through archived videos when a channel isn't broadcasting. Users will also be able post pre-edited video content to their channels, which is a huge change.

Hopefully, this continues the strong rivalry going on between Twitch and YouTube Gaming. While YouTube Gaming looks gorgeous and has plenty of awesome game streaming features of its own, it doesn't look like it's anywhere close to usurping Twitch from its throne. At the same time, Twitch is wrestling against the almighty YouTube, so who knows how this video game-streaming rivalry will continue throughout the rest of 2015 and into 2016.

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