Twitch Implements Controversial New Policy Changes

@virtualpolecat: He didn't say hes switching sites, he said hes considering it. His reason also seems entirely based around the two hour highlight limitation which doesn't seem to be the same thing everyone else is freaking out about.

And so begins the mass exodus to ustream.

The problem comes in with how this is working and it being worked by robots and not humans. Did these companies really fire that many people that they need robots to do their work? Is it really that expansive to hire people to analysis videos to really see if they were really using music that they shouldn't use?

Copyright has become a form of desperateness from these companies to make sure they are making money and to keep a new form of entertainment down.

I can confirm they've muted everything in my recent archive that had licensed tracks. Namely, Burnout Paradise. Whole buncha bullshit, if you ask me.

I guess it's time to make a non-shitty knockoff?

Copyright is stagnant and weird. Unless they expect someone to license music at outrageous prices for their little gaming stream, which would be crazy. The purpose of copyright used to be ensuring a revenue stream, so that other people can't exploit your work until you at least recuperate the resources you put in, and possibly profited.

Nowadays it seems that copyright is just a way to aggressively protect something you hold some kind of ownership of, even if you didn't create it - like some stories of music being pulled from artists own youtube channels by their music label.

I suppose these Twitchers are earning some money from ads, but its probably peanuts. And if it's NOT peanuts, then hey - maybe license some music.

"Hey you know what we should do next? Fuck free ascertainment of various artist through Twitch. Sounds good? Ok, good!"

That's basically what they're doing. I hate when rules and templates from past technology is implemented on new technology, where it doesn't fit at all.

It might be preemptive since they also realized they (Twitch) are becoming a lot more prominent to the mainstream and their audience is rapidly outgrowing its niche so companies that are very protective of their copyright are starting to take notice.

If something exists and is cool, chances are corporations will find a way to ruin it.

The archiving stuff has never worked right for me, anyway. I clicked "Save Forever" on every video, even though I probably shouldn't've had to, since I checked the "don't delete stuff" option. I just cancelled my Turbo subscription, so at least the changes will have some impact.

http://m.memegenerator.net/instance/53367349

Yep. This is how Twitch dies. Nothing can ever be good on the Internet forever.

@truthtellah: Ah. I wondered what that black box with my name was last night. Thanks for informing me on that.

@kingdanglerbk: the issue is that it also flags in game music. We already have vods of the International 4 used because it has Dota 2's music.

Sure. That's why I like when Giant Bomb allows their chatroom for streams. On Twitch, it really depends on the event. When you've got thousands and thousands of people, it can get crazy emote or text-wise. Emotes wouldn't change how crazy such event chats can get.

I do know there's a new feature where you can write someone's name, hit Tab, select their name from Chat, and it will show up in a black box for only that person to see. So, while everyone still sees your comment, it will stick out more prominently for the person you're talking to. The same applies to directly addressing the streamer. Put in their name, select it, and then they'll see it more prominently versus random comments.

I completely understand and agree that it all depends on the channel itself. I don't necessarily have an issue there. It's mainly event streams that twists the knife. So many people and so much bullshit. Wouldn't mind being able to ask a question without it being lost or never being able to see a reply. I shouldn't have to connect with IRC just so I can actually scroll up to see if it got noticed.

So apparently there is a Twitch "ask me anything" on reddit tomorrow. That should be interesting.

I think it depends on the stream. Many discourage the abuse of emoticons. I think they can be fun, but preferences vary stream to stream. For example, Giant Bomb allows them but sets a limit at one of a single emote in a comment. I'd prefer something more like 3, but it's not a big deal.

For streams like Cosmo where he basically allows and even encourages overuse of emoticons, it can certainly get out of hand, but it's his chat. If he thinks it's fun, then more power to him. Many chats have different standards, and for me personally, I like a healthy balance. Someone like Banansaurus_Rex knows how to encourage a balance, as people know when it's time to unload with emotes and when it's just time to tell him to stop being garbage at videogames. heh. (he's one of the best gamers I've seen, but it's fun to talk trash with him) Puncayshun loves for emotes and repeat messages to flood his chat, and at times, you don't actually see any real chat at all. LethalFrag is known to discourage emotes outside of instances where someone subscribes or something funny happens. I like that streamers have generally had the freedom to set their own preferred standards when it comes to emotes.

@truthtellah: lol. I really despise the chat spam it creates. Pretty sure it's just an age thing, but I really do find it annoying. They basically turned emotes into punctuation as every sentence seems to end in some face.

Most likely what happened is that their lawyers, who are fresh from their lawsuit and settlement with Viacom, examined Twitch and said "well this is a walking lawsuit."

Kappa?

this

Well, I have cancelled my Twitch Turbo account and my subscription to Loading Ready Run's channel.

Shame about LRR, I really like those guys.

As long as Mario party still can be played on Giant Bomb I'm okay with anything!

Stop playing Copy right material during a profitable video, you are breaking the law - IMO

Google is stuck in the position of being the point person for the terrible people at RIAA/MPAA/alphabet soup who demand complete and utter control over everything that can possibly touch their precious precious precious IP. They either do this or get raked over the courts who are much more sympathetic to old tyme music industry than tech giants.

That said, I would have rather seen Google and Twitch implement an open system where if some company is really interested in defending their IP, they provide an interface for them to scan and apply their own algorithm to it to flag. This puts the onus on those guys instead of the service provider and it becomes easier to figure out who is being the ahole and what to avoid. And importantly if it turns out that there is abuse with poor or bad claims, they can suspend their access to flagging system. If those guys want to be in obscurity unless they get paid then I'm all for it but they should be responsible for telling "us" what is not okay to use instead of finding out later.

What do you have against emotes?

While this is generally pretty shitty all around, you'll be happy to know SDA has always archived their own marathons. Keep an eye on their site and SGDQ2014 should pop up on the main page within a month or two.

I know it is, but sadly they're a small slice of the pie now. The high view games on Twitch are League, Hearthstone, Minecraft, CS:GO and DotA. Obviously there are exceptions when things like AGDQ run, or when a site like Giant Bomb come in and put Mario Party up in the most popular games for a couple of hours, but those five titles are a good rule of thumb. Twitch makes their money off those games being their bread and butter, not the weird exceptions that pop up occasionally for small periods of time. Obviously the self-destruction of archives today is not a helpful thing, but the archives of those games are significantly less important and less relevant to the people watching those bread and butter games on Twitch.

The speedrunning community was really important to Twitch in its infancy, but they're considered small fries now except for two or three weeks of the year. This situation sucks, but it's the Google approach to things: cater to the more casual/mainstream users, ignore all complaints of the hardcore/superusers. Dumb down functionality, dumb down the UI, and if a large percentage isn't using something then just cut it.

Yeah, however in regards to the larger user base of Twitch as a whole, only a very small percentage of archived full broadcast content is ever rewatched and most of it is not even watched at all, thus that content is pretty much just taking up space though they do admit that space isn't the issue but rather they wanted to also move their videos over to a different format other than FLV that can also be viewed in mobile devices that don't support Flash (e.g. iOS devices). Thus some of the consequences of this involve archived content being sacrificed since it'd be difficult to try to convert ALL the old archive content to a more mobile friendly format (probably HTML5 based video).

Now they're actively encouraging their users who stream to upload their broadcasts to other sites (i.e. YouTube) in order to be saved indefinitely but YouTube also has duration restrictions of their own.

All around the situation is very distressing and also very inconvenient.

I can understand the mute thing but getting rid of the archives is dumb.

The archives are pivotal to speedrunners (you know, the group that put twitch on the scene in the first place), which is why they are all already talking on twitter about switching sites. hitbox.tv has been coming up a lot.

Because it's easier and more cost efficient to let a computer do what should in all honesty be a human's job.

Really, this just shows how much archaic copyright laws need to change.

Goodbye Twitch, it was fun while it lasted.

Follow the money people. They are already making the next thing for everyone to flock to.

Straight out of Goodfellas. Light a match.

How do we know Youtube would have lost though? Sure there were lawsuits but none of that ever fully played out. Google just delayed things and then willingly buckled to copyright holders once they bought Youtube.

Nobody knows what Youtube would be right now if Google didn't buy them but I am of the belief that they absolutely wouldn't be dead.

As a counter to my own using of past evidence from YouTube to anticipate problems with the policy, I can go right now and find thousands and thousands of whole albums and episodes of TV shows on YouTube. It goes to show that this shit is not perfect despite their best intentions. And I want to be clear here, I think that's a good thing.

Which brings me back to the point that the archiving change is more immediately damaging. Certainly the music copyright policy is problematic in an academic sense but given that it's also a muting system and not a takedown system (which makes sense considering it's not an upload service) there's not as much "lost" as it would be if the VOD's were taken down. Whereas that's exactly what would happen if someone let their archived videos lapse. Then again I'm sure the community is going to adapt and be more mindful of redundant archiving in the future. Still, with the limited length of time and content ID together it's a huge blow to the utility of VOD's on the site.

In a way you could kind of see them trying to get away from archiving when they announced PS4 accounts could not have automatic archiving. I can see how they're really trying anything to lighten the load of all that data but they have to know it's not in the user's favor.

On a related note, it makes me wonder what would happen if you take a muted VOD right now and uploaded the archive to YouTube. I bet it would be just as it was.

I loved you twitch. Goodbye.

Holy fuck, this is dumb. Games license music all the time. Every time that audio is played the video is going to be muted? HO-LY FUCK, that. is. dumb.

Cannot wait for someone to overtake Twitch. I really hope people have the balls to stop using Twitch. This is just the dumbest fucking shit.

bunch of bullshit crap, all that streamed music is a friggin ad for the bands and the streaming companies, pandora, last.fm or just strait youtube. it doesn't make sense copyright infringement my ass. This is more like "We're not interested in money only protecting the products and the companies who make them" I commonly hear music on a stream that I like then look up and purchase it. They will undoubtedly lose money from this.

This is more the death of archived content on Twitch, and less so the death of the site itself. If they ever have to do live content-ID matching then we're in real trouble. Honestly, they already killed what worth the archives had earlier today, so tacking on this broken content-ID system doesn't even matter. People will move if a better service begins to exist, but I don't think the archives are enough to get most people to move. It sucks for me because I pretty much only watch archived video on Twitch, but such is life.

Twitch is still a good streaming site, it's just that now they're only a streaming site, and nothing more.

I wonder if Twitch and/or Google have been threatened with some kind of lawsuit from one or more of the major record labels or RIAA regarding usage of artists' music, or if this is more of a preemptive strike just in case they may get sued someday.

Oh man. Now I want that @patrickklepek interview even more! Bring on the dump truck!

Edit: Better yet! Bring on the Bombin' the AM guest!

@yoshisaur: defeatism.

I don't believe this individual is disagreeing with you. What they are trying to say is Youtube would no longer be around if someone had not bought them and put a leash on it so to speak. With the amount of copyrighted music/movies/tv etc that was being uploaded they would have been sued into oblivion. The world is a very litigious place.