How Twitch knows you are watching
The Twitch player does not send video back to Twitch, and Twitch has no way to see your screen. What it has is a stream of small status messages the player sends while it is running — periodic events that say this account is currently viewing this channel. Watch time for Drop campaigns is counted from those events.
That is the entire mechanism, and it explains most of the behaviour people find confusing. Muting does not matter because audio is client-side. Minimising usually works because the player keeps running. Background browser tabs sometimes fail because the browser throttles timers and the events stop being sent. Nothing about your attention is measured, only whether the player is reporting.
Why it can be automated
Since progress comes from reported status rather than from rendered video, the video is the expensive part and the least necessary. A session that authenticates as your account and reports viewing a qualifying channel accrues watch time the same way an open browser does, without downloading the stream at all. This is what "farming Drops without watching" means in practice.
The practical benefit is that it stops being a foreground activity. Campaigns commonly ask for several hours across multiple tiers, and running several campaigns during the same week is otherwise impossible for one person with one screen. A hosted session removes the browser, the electricity and the babysitting — Boostr runs the watch sessions on servers so your machine can be off.
The parts that cannot be skipped
Automation only replaces the watching. Everything else about a campaign still applies exactly as it does manually.
- Account linking. Most campaigns need your game account connected to Twitch before anything is deliverable.
- Channel eligibility. The channel must be in the campaign category with Drops enabled.
- One session at a time. Twitch counts a single active viewing session, so campaigns queue rather than stack.
- Claiming. A completed tier still has to be claimed from the Drops Inventory before the campaign closes.
- Regional and platform limits. If a campaign is not available for your region or platform, no amount of watch time helps.
Watch Drops versus sub-only rewards
Not every reward on a campaign page is a watch-time Drop. Publishers also run rewards gated behind an active subscription to a participating channel, and some campaigns mix both — a few tiers earned by watching, and a headline item that requires a sub. Sub-gated rewards check for an entitlement on your account, not for time, so watch time is irrelevant to them and no automation can produce one.
Twitch Prime and Prime Gaming rewards are a third category again. Those are attached to an Amazon Prime subscription and are claimed from the Prime Gaming page rather than earned. When a campaign appears to be making no progress despite hours of watch time, check which category the reward you want actually belongs to.
Claiming is where campaigns are lost
Banked watch time is not a reward. When a tier completes, the item sits in your Drops Inventory behind a claim button, and when the campaign window closes an unclaimed item is generally forfeited. People lose more Drops to forgetting this step than to any tracking problem — the hours were done, the reward was earned, and nobody pressed the button.
Automatic claiming is therefore the more valuable half of the automation. Boostr claims completed tiers as they finish rather than leaving them queued for a human to notice, which removes the single most common failure mode of long campaigns.
The rules, plainly
Twitch's terms of service prohibit using automated means to inflate or simulate viewership, and reporting watch time without a person watching sits inside that. Enforcement in practice has focused on view-count manipulation of channels rather than on individual Drop farming, and Twitch accounts are generally less valuable than a Steam library, but the exposure is real: an account can be suspended, and any Drops attached to it go with it.
The same honesty applies here as with Steam idling. This is against the rules, most people never hear anything, and neither of those facts cancels the other out. Decide with that in view rather than on a promise that it is safe.