Twitch Launches Squad Stream For Streamers With Friends

Want to watch your favorite Twitch streamer and all of his or her teammates at the same time? Thanks to a new Twitch feature called Squad Stream, it's now possible.

Squad Stream was announced at last year's TwitchCon in October, and many Twitch streamers have been eagerly awaiting its introduction ever since. Squad Stream stands to make viewing Twitch streams a lot more fun, as you'll be able to watch a streamer play Destiny 2, for example, and also see video from three other fireteam members as the group tackles a raid. Digital Trends mentions the obvious game everyone will likely be employing Squad Stream for: Apex Legends. In that case, because teams are only made up of three people, you could get a look at what everyone on the team is up to.

Far too often, a streamer's teammates are making moves and killing enemies out of frame, and all of the collaboration taking place doesn't translate well to a single Twitch window. With Squad Stream, viewers will hopefully get a better handle on all of the action.

Squad Stream also has the potential to benefit streamers, too. Imagine someone with a small-but-growing Twitch channel getting the opportunity to team up with Ninja in Fortnite. If their Twitch broadcast is added to Ninja's, some of Ninja's viewers might take a look at that smaller streamer's channel, follow, and — if they like it enough — subscribe. Squad Stream could definitely help streamers promote other streamers — perhaps even better than shoutouts and raids do now.

We have to be fair, though — Mixer, the Microsoft-owned streaming platform that is built into every Xbox One, has something similar to Squad Stream called co-streaming... and that feature has been there since May 2017. Mixer doesn't have anywhere near the audience Twitch does, so it's not surprising that some outside the Mixer ecosystem might be unaware of co-streaming. But we'll at least give Mixer props for introducing that feature way ahead of its rival.

Twitch's Squad Stream feature is now live.