Twitch's speakeasies: Livestreaming site begins rolling out invite-only group chat rooms

It’s awesome to have 100,000 people watching an event on Twitch. It’s less awesome to have 100,000 all jabbering in the chat at the same time, but the livestreaming platform is working on a solution to this problem.

Twitch will begin rolling out a beta test of its new group chat today. This feature will enable the people using Twitch to stream video of their gameplay to nest a smaller band of friends in a private, invite-only room. The standard lobby, which everyone sees, will still continue uninterrupted. Twitch is treating this as its foray into social networking. It wants broadcasters to use group chat to stay in touch with their best gamer buds. This represents Twitch’s next step in upping its social game after getting its platform integrated on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.