Twitch’s new IRL category is for streaming everyday life stuff

Twitch is continuing to expand its scope beyond gaming today with the launch of a new streaming category called IRL. IRL is meant to be a place for users to share their, erm, real life experiences.

“What we’ve heard repeatedly from [Twitch’s creators] is that they are interested in sharing their everyday lives, thoughts, and opinions with their communities,” Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said in a statement. “IRL is designed to help our creators foster that kind of community interaction.”

IRL is the most recent attempt by Twitch to expand streaming (and viewing) options for users. This summer, Twitch launched a “Social Eating” category, where users could stream themselves eating or drinking. Unsurprisingly, it’s not the most active category, but when I spent some lurking there a few months ago, I did find it to be a pretty pleasant one.

Still, “real life” is obviously a much broader category than social eating, so maybe it will get better mileage on Twitch. Unfortunately, you still can’t live stream from Twitch’s mobile app, which would make sense for a category that’s supposed to show you the real world. But Twitch says it plans to launch that feature sometime next year. 

The article was published on : theverge