I would really like to see an official endpoint to query the current viewers of a stream, as user ids. The old, undocumented endpoint http://tmi.twitch.tv/group/user/twitchplayspokemon/chatters has always been troublesome and unreliable due to its “unofficial” state and frequent failures, but now it became even more problematic because of public name changes. I’ve seen names float around and cause trouble in our system even about 30 minutes after they got a name change.
What would work too is a heartbeat-like service for streams instead of games, like described here: Viewer Heartbeat Service for channels
but it would need to not require users to opt-in. So I don’t think it fits this task too well.
Agreed; the lack of a proper viewers/chatters endpoint is becoming increasingly problematic, especially considering JOIN irc messages are suppressed in channels with over 1000 chatters. It would be very useful to have this information for channel analytics.
Is there a reason an official chatters endpoint hasn’t been implemented? It seems like an often-requested but neglected feature.
Seems like Drops and the VHS is the first step in the direction of allowing developers to collect viewer information from willing participants although very limited in scope at this time. Hopefully Twitch will expand on it on the future.
I would consider a true viewer list a privacy violation so there would need to be some robust per-app or per-channel authorization system first.
We are talking about an official API to not rely on undocumented (legacy) endpoints. Where do you think that button gets its data from? An internal endpoint 3rd party developers cannot rely on