It is no secret that I am excited to see a new platform that is rising up from the ashes of Mixer. This platform is Trovo, a new streaming platform backed by Tencent. In our previous article, we covered the existing features on the platform as it stands today, but in this one, we’ll go over some of the, in my opinion, pretty awesome planned features that they have in store for us.
I’ll also share some thoughts on what features I would like to see added to the platform, things that I believe could be game-changers for the streaming industry. I’d love to hear your opinions on these ideas, and by all means, feel free to let me know what you think about them. Whether you think they are terrible, somewhere in between, or amazing, I’m all ears!
Table of Contents
Planned Features to be added to Trovo in July
Taken from their post on Reddit, Here are the features that they are working on for the month of July:
- Lurking Mode
- This allows you to toggle a mode to be set invisible, or incognito to chat announcements when you join a channel.
- VODs
- Just like Twitch & Mixer before, Save a copy of your past streams, including the ability to comment on it. If it’s added now, it’s already ahead of Mixer in multiple ways.
- User Mentions in chat
- @, Copy and pinning will be added as well
- Streamer Authentication & payout system
- No details were given, but I presume they mean Two-factor Authentication, but because it isn’t specified, I can not be certain.
- Monetization Analytics
- Remember, stare too long at the metrics, and they might just stare back at you.
- Play in Background
- Not entirely sure what they mean by this, but we shall see!
- Sub and Spells on IOS app
- Spells are the Mixer Sticker equivalent. Spend Mana and Elixir to “cast a spell” and build up a community goal.
Other planned features in development
As for some Pending Features they have planned:
- A phone app capable of live streaming directly to Trovo, like the Streamlabs App, but tailored to the platform.
- Hosting & Raids: They are taking note of features that Twitch has and are going to be adding these. They may be called something else though by the time they launch.
- Clips: Yes, You won’t have to wait years to get a platform clipping feature like you did on Mixer. Yay progression!
- The Trovo dev team intends to allow you to Gift a sub to a channel, again drawing inspiration from Twitch.
- They are working on a Partner program and unique benefits available to partners only. No details on what this will encompass, but we shall see.
- More Mod Powers & Permissions
- Follower/Subscriber-Only Chat Mode
- Custom Stream Alerts: Apparently they are taking notes from third-party devs and intend to incorporate a native alert system for Follows, Suns, and even unique alerts for spells.
- User-uploaded custom emotes: The staple of Twitch will be added here too for subscriber benefits.
- Custom Commands and the potential for an inhouse chatbot
- A Direct Message system, aka whispers.
- They’re going to expand the Mana and Elixir system in currently unrevealed ways. What that means is anyone’s guess, but we’ll get more value out of em.
- VIP Badge for your biggest fans
- Built-in Giveaway system, integrated into the chat.
- OBS Login instead of the ol’ stream key method.
Features that I hope get added to Trovo, and everywhere else
Out of the many possible directions Trovo could take as a streaming platform, It seems to be taking a solid path so far. However, there are a few features I’d love to see incorporated into the platform that I think would really set it apart from Twitch in a good way.
While these might not necessarily be planned features, it’s important to talk about this subject, so let’s get into it!
Unrestricted Co-Streaming
Twitch currently has a feature called “Stream Teams” that function sort of in the way you’d expect, but It is fairly limited, and feels almost like an afterthought. It also requires a partner to invite people to the team, which is extremely restrictive.
My idea is a little bit different, and far more simple. Instead of being a set team, where one partner has to carry the weight of forming, you can simply create and delete teams whenever kind of like how Twitch communities were. I liked Twitch communities, and I still wonder why they got rid of that feature. Anyways, the team would be a sort of Multistream channel with 4 quadrants, each quadrant assigned in a first-up first serve basis.
To stream in a Co-stream environment, there will be a setting to choose when you go live. All 4 streamers must toggle “this is a co-stream” and select the “team” in a dropdown. That will configure the UI to include a “show all” or “Hide all but one” for the viewers. This “Hide all but one” will mute all of the audio tracks of the co-streamers except the active one, and show the stream from a single perspective. In this mode, you have another button “cycle to next streamer” which will, as you expect, cycle to the next streamer.
It gives the audience control of their personal streaming perspective, so they can zoom in to the content without worry.
Mentioning Audio tracks... Here’s the next idea.
Multiple Audio Tracks Support:
I’d love to see the ability to send multiple audio tracks to stream, with the ability for the audience members to be able to toggle them on or off individually. The thought process behind this is to allow your audience to omit the music track that a streamer sends out, enabling them to listen to their own tunes. This feature also has a ton of potential beyond that.
For example, instead of the music track, users could toggle on and off the stream’s discord audio track. Some people like to hone in on just the streamer.
Recorded video has been utilizing this technology for decades. It’s high time streaming catches up to this standard in the media world. I’m not joking when I say that this is something that would fundamentally change streaming, depending on how it is utilized. I sincerely hope all streaming platforms consider implementing this, even at the 160-320 bitrate hit that comes for each unique track.
Social Buttons + Custom Website links:
▼▼▼ Like these ▼▼▼
Many websites use this feature, including us. It is an industry-standard for web marketing companies and businesses globally. It’s high time that integrated social media buttons are integrated into all of the streaming platforms. Create a section in the settings window to allow users the ability to link their social profiles, as well as custom links. I’d love to be able to add my Twitter, Sketchfab, Reddit, and plop a link to whatever site on it for easy access for my audience.
Something like this can dramatically help the discoverability factor of content creators, depending on their efforts and strategies utilized on these platforms.
Some of my ideas of what I consider to be necessary social buttons to include:
- Discord
- YouTube
- Tiktok
- Patreon
- Custom Links
Also, multiple custom links needs to be allowed in case a streamer has multiple links they’d like to include.
Flesh out the Info tab underneath the streamer
I was never much of a fan with how mixer handled the Info tab. I would like to see a simple WYSIWYG editor with some basic column layouts, and some panel-esque modules to be added to it. Perhaps some preset templates to choose from? People aren’t naturally web developers, so they may not know HTML or CSS.
.col-50 { /* This is Css */
Width: 50%;
float: left;
etc...
}
<div class="col-50 pri-bg-c pri-t-c"> <!-- This is HTML -->
<h1 class="title pri-t-c txt-c">
This is an example line of HTML to show how
confusing it can be to those who don't deal with it on a daily basis.
</h1>
<p>This isn't even going into the styling that involves stuff... Just the DOM layout.</p>
</div>Too much to ask for?
Maybe…
Still, I’d like to see the info tab improved a bit.
Mixplay Alternative
Please, PLEASE bring back Mixplay in some successor form. The on-channel buttons that did stuff were fantastic, even able to trigger in-game stuff in some special cases.
Anyways, Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to hit that follow button, like and sub- I mean… Wrong platform…
/facepalm…
See yah in the next one!