And Twitch is back at it again after only a few hours and has announced even more massive changes to how they’re handling videos.

The newest change is one that I think a lot of people were expecting for awhile, which is the issue of copyrighted music in streams.

Apparently, they will not be policing livestreams, but they will be policing any stored videos.

To me, there are two ways in which I think this is insane:

  1. “We’ve partnered with Audible Magic, which works closely with the recorded music industry, to scan past and future VODs for music owned or controlled by clients of Audible Magic. This includes in-game and ambient music.”

So basically, if a game you play regularly has their soundtrack as part of the Audible Magic catalogue, you’re effectively screwed. Your videos will never have audio.

  1. “If third party audio is detected anywhere in the 30-minute scanned block, the entire 30 minutes will be muted.”

So probably literally 10 seconds of music (which I’m pretty sure would fall under fair use) could get an entire 30 minute block “banned”.

At this point, I tend to think that either they’re about to be bought by Google (the persistent rumour), or they’re sure as hell positioning themselves to be bought by Google or someone else.

Combined with the changes they announced earlier today, I’d also somewhat think that they’re positioning themselves to be symbiotic with youtube. This doesn’t have to be indicative that a Google buyout is near. It could just mean that Twitch considers the saved videos part of their business to be too much of a liability either due to copyright issues or the cost of storing/streaming so much back catalogue content, so instead they’re placing more emphasis on getting people to get their videos off of twitch and onto youtube.

I feel somewhat lucky in a weird way given that I only jumped into this a couple of weeks ago (though I’ve been a viewer since fall of 2013 or so). So I haven’t had been around long enough as a streamer to really feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under me.

And though I haven’t played copyright music on my streams thus far, I’m very concerned about the whole “in-game” music thing. It sounds like I very well could end up affected even if I never play a single copyrighted song on my stream just because the game(s) I play might have music in them that gets flagged.

To me, I think the takeaway is to never use Twitch to store any of your videos. Use it for livestreaming only.

Now they do say this:

Audio Recognition will only be run against audio in VODs. We are not scanning live broadcasts and there is no automated takedown of live content.

But you know what, I don’t buy it. That’s how it’s going to be for now. I feel like they’ve made far too many sweeping changes recently to be trusted in the long run. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they start policing livestreams in the future.

And in general this whole thing would be a somewhat good example of why you should never ever have your entire userbase on other people’s web properties (twitch, youtube, tumblr, etc). Not that it’s necessarily easy to diversify. But at the least you could attempt to spread out and get people onto:

  • your youtube
  • your twitter
  • your website

I mean, you’ll probably still end up with all of your livestreaming eggs in the Twitch basket, but at least if you decide to jump ship for a different livestreaming provider, you’ll have an easier way of notifying people (e.g. through twitter) and getting people to hopefully follow you to the new location.

For me, this is a sad day, even though I’m not all that affected by it (yet). And it definitely gives me pause about the future of Twitch.