Everyone’s favorite video game livestreaming platform Twitch announced two rather large changes that they are going to be making to their streaming service. While neither change directly affects streaming itself, they both have a huge impact on the massive archives contained on the site.
The first of the major changes has to do with the audio contained within a video. Many Twitch users will play audio in the background while they stream, and they may not always have access the copyright of the music that they play. Twitch is attempting to combat this problem by partnering with a company called Audible Magic. Audible Magic’s job is going to be scanning all archived videos for music being used illegally. If the program detects unauthorized music use, it will mute the audio for that portion of the video. There are two huge problems with this, though.
The first of those problems is that the software is not 100% accurate. I can understand them wanting to help support musicians by blocking unauthorized streaming of their music, but this program will block copyrighted audio even if it is contained as part of the music in a game. Say you decide to stream a game like Just Dance, where the majority of the in-game audio is going to be copyrighted music. The game itself has already gone through the process of obtaining the rights to the music. Just by playing a game like this, all of your audio is going to end up muted. Luckily, in a blog post by Twitch, they provide ways for you to request restoring the audio.
The second problem is the timing of the muted portion of the stream. Audible Magic scans videos in 30-minute increments. Instead of only muting the part of the video where the copyrighted music occurs, it will mute the entire 30-minute block that the music is contained in. So if your video contains 5-10 seconds of copyrighted content, an entire 30 minutes will be muted because of this. Again, I can see where they are coming from in wanting to help the music industry, but there has got to be a better way of going about doing this.
The other update rolled out deals with the actual archiving of video footage. The videos themselves are currently available indefinitely, but Twitch has decided to change that. As of the blog post yesterday, Twitch will no longer offer you the option of saving your stream forever. You will only be able to save it for 14 days if you are a regular subscriber, while Turbo subscribers will be able to store for 60 days. Highlights will still be available indefinitely, but they will be limited to 2 hours in length. The reasoning for these changes is that Twitch wants to upgrade the way they store videos, but the expense of storing them more efficiently means they will not be able to keep the videos forever. This update I actually agree with. While it’s nice to be able to go back and watch videos whenever you want, Twitch showed that statistically after 14 days, there is a minimal percentage of people who will go back and watch your stream.
Both updates are a big change to how Twitch does things, so followed up the announcements with a Reddit AMA with the CEO. They are also doing Twitch Weekly tomorrow (Friday) at 2 pm PST. So what do you guys think? Do you agree? I can at least see where they are coming from with these changes, but the execution does leave a little to be desired. We’ll just have to wait and see how it holds up once people begin experiencing the updates.
(via Game Rant)
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