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Twitch’s new Squad Stream lets 4 players broadcast together on the same screen

Now all you need is a squad…

twitch squad stream
Image: VentureBeat

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Twitch just announced a new feature that lets users squad up and multistream with up to four streamers without the use of any third-party tools – they’re calling it Squad Stream.

This new feature lets you and three other streamers go live at the same time, in the same window. That means you can do things like play PUBG with every member of your team all on the same screen. You could play Drawful or other Jackbox games with all of the players shown on the same stream video, or even do things like 4-player Let’s Dance dance-offs, or whatever else your creativity can come up with.

Until now, streamers on Twitch who wanted to show multiple streams needed to use third-party tools to put feeds from multiple people onto one stream. Creators have been waiting for Squad Stream to arrive since its announcement at Twitchcon 2018. If you’re not a Twitch partner, your wait will be a little bit longer.

Twitch’s Squad Stream isn’t available for everyone….yet

That’s because, at launch, Squad Stream is only available to partners. Twitch says this is due to needing video quality options (also known as transcodes). With most streamers broadcasting in 720p or above, without those video quality options, each 4-way stream would be 4K or above, limiting your viewer’s ability to watch. Affiliates and other streamers will eventually get the Squad Stream functionality, as Twitch rolls out video quality options to more broadcasters.

Image: Twitch

I’m pretty psyched to see what the Twitch community comes up with for these multi-creator streams. With the prior tools, things like live roleplay, GTAV Roleplay, and speedrunning competitions have all been broadcasted simultaneously. Now that there’s an easier tool to squad up, I imagine that more multistreams will happen, with games that hadn’t previously been used.

If you want to check out the new Squad Stream in action, head over to the Twitch blog where there’s a timetable with well-known creators squadding up. Four players split screen Goldeneye 64, anyone?

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Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.

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