Twitch CEO Emmert Shear took time out to answer questions from the community regarding yesterday’s big change announcements.
Regarding the umting of Valve’s DOTA 2 videos, this was an accident but it’s without a doubt going to happen again. Emmert responded with:
That was a false positive (misidentification of crowd noise as music), which we’ve now fixed.
While Twitch will be flagging videos for music, it won’t happen for live streams.
We have absolutely no intention of flagging songs due to original in-game music. If that’s happening (and it appears it is), it’s a problem and we will investigate and try to fix it.
Because we care about you and your viewers, and we want every broadcaster on Twitch to be protected from potential liability. No matter how remote you might feel the issue is, we aren’t willing to run the risk someone’s life gets ruined over this.
Live streams will not be affected by the audio scanning which was mentioned yesterday, it will only affect the highlights.
Future plans: increase the scan resolution so that we don’t have to flag 30 minute chunks at a time, identify why things have been flagged, institute an appeals system, make sure there isn’t any original game music on the flagging list.
We have no plans at all for it to expand to live content.
Regarding highlights being limited to two hours, it looks like this could take some tweaking.
“Our research prior to launching the feature indicated that almost no highlights were longer than 2 hours, and we were concerned about abuse of the tool. It’s clear that we underestimated the demand and need for a solution here, and fortunately we have 3 weeks to figure one out. Expect changes here soon.”
“It has disproportionately large impact on certain communities (speedrunning most obviously) and we’re very concerned about making sure that every community on Twitch has a good experience.”
Yesterday’s announcements came as a bit of a sjick to many, there was a lot to digest and the changes fundamentally change the way in which users can use Twitch. In respons to how it was announced Emmert added:
Simply put: we screwed up and should have announced it ahead of time. Sorry.
Based on the answered supplied this evening , the changes are not good for the Twitch community and we have already seen users migrate in their droves to other services. Peter is putting an articles together on this which will be live shortly.
The upshot is that if you don’t like the way Youtube handles copyright issues with its terrible support and mis-flagging of videos, it’s time to leave Twitch behind.
You can read the full AMA here in Reddit.
