Twitch is the biggest name in game streaming right now, with many contenders coming and falling. Now however it has some serious competition in the shape of Youtube Gaming and it seems to have made them sit up and take notice of their own faults.

Today at the first TwitchCon event, Twitch announced that a handful of new features were coming to the streaming platform early next year and the two biggest changes of note seem to be an attempt to compete with Youtube invading ‘their’ space. Most importantly of the two; Twitch will soon let you host video uploads without streaming it live first.

The video uploads means that you can record yourself playing a game and edit it into a cutdown format, before uploading it onto Twitch who will host the video for you and allow you to customise its thumbnail, description and tags as well as letting you put a bunch into a playlist. Stop me if this sounds in any way familiar. It’s a far cry from the Twitch that set expiry dates on the hosting of VoDs of your past livestreams.

However the other big thing is that Twitch are finally following the curve and are updating their video player to finally rid it entirely of Flash. Many other video sites, including Youtube, have already ditched Flash in favour of HTML5 and Twitch has already made a partial step in theirs being part-Flash, part-HTML5. This does tax computers though so the update will be welcomed by many, myself being one of them.

Other features will include things like a dedicated Playstation app coming at the same time and improved whisper functionality as well as many other smaller tweaks and fixes that will hopefully allow Twitch to just run smoother. Popular and wide-used it might be, but everyone who has used Twitch as a streamer or viewer knows that it could do with some improvement and it seems like we might finally be getting some at last. That’s good.

Shame there’s nothing you can do to patch out trolls in the Twitch Chat.