So you’ve got a group of people you watch on Twitch? You’ve found common ground with them, and want to showcase them to your own channel’s viewers? You can automatically host their content when you’re offline, showing their videos on your channel and helping grow their audience in the times you aren’t streaming.
You can even have a list of people you like so that there’s a greater chance at least one of them will be offline and be automatically hosted.
The process for setting up auto hosting is pretty simple, so let’s have a quick look at it. We’re doing this on the desktop website; I’m afraid I don’t think it can be done in the mobile app.
Firstly, you’ll want to head to your own channel – mine’s https://twitch.tv/rand0mbl0ke but yours will, of course be different.
Once there, click on the profile icon in the top-right corner of the screen and select Creator Dashboard.
You’ll be taken, surprisingly, to the Creator Dashboard where you have a range of options. The one we want is in the left-hand menu. Expand the Preferences section, and then click on Channel.
The right-hand panel will change now, to give you channel-specific options. Scroll down in that panel until you find the section headed Auto Hosting.
Here you can see the various options I have set. The most important one is to turn the Auto host channels option on. You can then toggle the other options to your heart’s content. I like to have the hosting priority set to random, as it means there’s a good variety of content being shown on my channel. If I didn’t set that, Twitch would host channels in the order they’re on my hosting list instead.
Speaking of the hosting list, you can set that by clicking the option at the bottom of the previous image, “Host list > Add and manage your hosted channels”.
To add new channels to the list, just search for them in the box at the top and click Add when you’ve found the one you want. You can also drag and drop channels in this list to change their order, which is handy if you really do want to host them in order of preference. There’s no need to save your changes; they’re automatically saved each time you add or move a channel.
And that’s it! If you’ve got the auto host option turned on, and some channels in your hosting list, you’ll automatically host them whenever you’re offline and they are streaming.
Oh, one more thing! The channels you select to auto host also appear on your channel page as Suggested Streamers. You can see this on my own channel, or in the screenshot below.
There we go! I hope this has been helpful – happy hosting, and happy streaming!
Edit: I just realised the Suggested Streamers list is actually your Streamer Shelf, which can be set to show your auto hosted streamers, stream team members, or turned off entirely. This option is on the Channel preferences screen, right above the Auto Host options.
