Twitch.tv has long been the go-to website for online streaming, especially when it comes to video games. Since its inception Twitch has fought off multiple competitors over the years and has become the undisputed best in streaming services. Communities like speedrunning revolve around twitch as they use the site to stream their speedruns to friends and fans and interact with their viewers. The website is also heavily used by competitive video game organisations, if a video game tournament is streamed it is almost certainly going to be on Twitch. Furthermore Twitch is used to stream the yearly games expo E3 and other companies, like Nintendo, have taken to their own channels to announce details for their upcoming titles. Now it seems like the golden age of Twitch.tv may be over.
In a swift one–two punch of announcements, Twitch have declared a clamp down on copyrighted music (currently only on VODs) and that there will no longer be a ‘save forever’ option for past broadcasts. This is a huge upheaval and a disastrous change for many broadcasters. It was part of the course that Twitch streams contained music, either the streamer was listening to some whilst playing a game or an organisation would play music during downtime, this is no longer possible. In future, broadcasts could be muted or even taken down should they use copyrighted materials. Currently the process is only applying to VODs causing huge problems for content makers as even the slightest snippet of copyrighted material will lead to a 30 minute blanket mute of a section of the archived footage. It seems like Twitch themselves are not safe from their own witch-hunt.
The VOD system is a little less controvesial and a little more understandable. According to Twitch CEO Emmet Shear, Twitch “discovered that 80% of our storage capacity is filled with past broadcasts that are never watched. That’s multiple petabytes for video that no one has ever viewed.” Faced with this information it’s harder to deny that Twitch are taking necessary steps to fix this problem. From now on the Past Broadcasts section will be kept for 14 days maximum and the only way to keep the videos for ever is to save them as Highlights or export them to Youtube, a process which is now being made easier.
It must be realised that these steps were an inevitability. Ever since the rumoured purchase of Twitch by software titans Google it was obvious that there was to be a clampdown of this nature, similar to the recent one on Youtube. Unfortunately for streamers and viewers, Twitch waited until they had secured a monopoly on internet streaming before busting out this new draconian legislation leaving those who disagree with these new decisions practically no alternative. Will this have a lasting effect on a formally beloved companion to video games? Will Twitch just be used as normal but with adherence to these new rules? The only option it to wait and see.
