Watch while you moderate

Reading chat without watching the stream is guesswork. Pyre.Chat carries a player, so the video sits next to the merged feed instead of in another tab. The chat stays one merged column no matter what the player is doing.

Open a stream

1. Click Watch in the header. The player opens above or beside the chat and the button changes to Watching. Clicking it again closes the player.

2. Pick a streamer from the dropdown in the player toolbar. It lists everyone you have added, live ones first.

3. Pick a platform by clicking one of the small pills on the row (TW, YT, KK), or click the streamer’s name to open the platform you picked for them last, preferring one that is live.

The watch list

Rows are streamers, not channels. Pyre uses 7TV’s account links to merge one person’s Twitch, YouTube and Kick channels into a single row, so a streamer who multistreams appears once with a pill per platform rather than three times.

A LIVE badge on the row means at least one of those platforms is up. The pills carry the per-platform detail: a live platform’s pill is filled in its platform colour, an offline one is greyed. Greyed does not mean disabled. Clicking an offline pill opens that platform anyway, which matters when you know a stream is up and the liveness check has not caught up yet. Each platform embed shows its own offline state if there is genuinely nothing there.

Pills for a channel you have not added are marked as suggestions, and their tooltip says exactly what the click will do. That is where the honest part lives: on Twitch and Kick, watching is public but reading chat needs you signed in to that platform, so the tooltip tells you the click will open the video and leave chat alone. See Connect your channels for the sign-in itself.

The circular arrow at the top of the list forces a fresh liveness check for every streamer on it, bypassing the cache, and reports how many are live. If you ask twice in quick succession it tells you it just checked and shows you the latest answer rather than hammering three platforms.

Two more buttons sit on every row, covered further down: the film reel opens past broadcasts, the scissors opens clips.

Side by side or stacked

The arrows button in the player toolbar switches between the two layouts: side by side puts the video in a column next to chat, stacked puts it above. Your choice is remembered.

Left alone, Pyre picks by window width: side by side from 900px wide, stacked below that. Under 640px it is always stacked, whatever you picked, because a video column and a readable chat column do not both fit on a phone.

Both layouts resize by dragging:

• Stacked: drag the bottom edge of the player to change its height.
• Side by side: drag the divider between the player and chat. Chat is never squeezed below a readable width, so the player stops rather than swallowing the feed.

The down arrow button is audio only: it hides the video and keeps the sound, which is the right shape for a stream you are listening to while you moderate another one.

The popout button opens the platform’s own player in a separate window, at which point you are watching on Twitch, YouTube or Kick and Pyre is out of the picture. There is no matching popout for the chat: a floating chat window that follows you across your desktop is what the desktop app is for, and its dock does the job properly.

Mosaic: up to four streams at once

The grid button turns on mosaic mode. Add streams to it with the plus on each watch-list row, or by clicking a platform pill while mosaic is on. Four tiles is the ceiling, and Pyre says so instead of silently dropping the fifth.

Only one tile has audio. Every other tile is muted, and the speaker button on a tile makes that tile the audio source. On Twitch and YouTube the switch is silent. On Kick it reloads that one tile, because Kick’s embedded player exposes no way to change its own mute state from outside.

Each tile carries its own strip of controls:

• The name pill switches that tile between the streamer’s platforms, when there is more than one linked. A small arrow marks the ones that can switch.
• The speaker takes the audio, as above.
• The speech bubble connects or disconnects that streamer’s chat. Its tooltip names which platforms it is about to act on, and says which ones need a sign-in first instead of failing quietly.
• The cross removes the tile.

Drag a tile by its control strip to reorder the grid. Reordering keeps the audio with the tile you moved, and does not reload any of the players.

Your mosaic survives a reload: the tiles, their order and which one has the audio are all remembered, so a refresh puts your wall back rather than starting you over.

Audio only and popout are hidden while mosaic is on. Neither one has a sensible meaning when there is no single current stream to act on.

The chat button on a tile is about the streamer, not the tile

Because rows are merged streamers, the speech bubble on a Kick tile connects and disconnects every linked channel for that person, Twitch included. That is usually what you want, and it is not what the tile you clicked implies. The tooltip names the platforms before you click, so read it when you only meant to touch one.

Past broadcasts and clips

Every watch-list row has both, live streamer or not, so you never have to make someone go live before you can look at their back catalogue.

• The film reel lists past broadcasts, with a tab per platform for Twitch, YouTube and Kick, showing each one’s length, age and view count.
• The scissors lists clips, filtered to the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, all time, or the ones the broadcaster has featured. Twitch only: Kick’s public API has no clips endpoint and YouTube has no clips to fetch.

Picking either one plays it in the same player, and a Back to live button appears to return you to that streamer’s live stream.

One exception: Kick past broadcasts open on kick.com in a new tab. Kick’s embeddable player handles live streams only and reports the embed as misconfigured for a recording, so Pyre hands you to Kick’s own player rather than showing you a broken frame.

Chat replay on a Twitch VOD

Play a Twitch past broadcast and the recorded chat replays with it, paced against the video rather than dumped in at once. Each replayed line is tagged with its position in the video instead of a wall-clock time, so you can see when something was said. Seek the player and the replay re-syncs to where you landed.

This is Twitch VODs only. Clips have no chat replay, and YouTube does not expose per-second chat history for a finished broadcast in a form anything can replay.

When a stream will not play

Some channels cannot be embedded at all, and an embed that a platform refuses looks the same as one that is loading forever. Two things to try, in this order: pick a different platform for the same streamer from the watch list, then use the popout button to open the platform’s own player in its own window.

While a stream is playing, Pyre asks your browser to keep the screen awake, and asks again when you come back to the tab, since the operating system drops that request whenever the window loses focus. Browsers without the wake lock API ignore this, which is why a laptop can still dim on you.