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There is general unrest across the games steaming community this morning following Twitch’s sudden introduction of an audio copyright detecting tech.
The decision mirrors similar moves made by YouTube last year – and yes, that’s the YouTube rumoured to be on the verge of a $1bn acquisition of the company.
The tech in question is provided by Audible Magic and scans all video-on-demand footage – including archived content – for any audio on its existing database. If something is flagged then the video’s audio will be muted for 30 minutes. A 30-minute block will be imposed for each flag.
Affected video will display an on-screen notification and a progress bar showing how long it will be until the audio returns.
The measures will not be implemented on live broadcasts for the time being.
We respect the rights of copyright owners, and are voluntarily undertaking this effort to help protect both our broadcasters and copyright owners,” Twitch said.
Please note that Audio Recognition is not guaranteed to be 100 per cent accurate. It may return false positives or miss content from copyright owners who do not work with Audible Magic.
If you wish to include music in your VODs, please remember that you are responsible for clearing all such rights (this includes ambient music that may be playing in the background while you are broadcasting).”
An example of the muting penalty can be found in this video, where a Dota 2 player’s background music triggered a flag.
Twitch is also beefing up its VOD offering by introducing higher video quality, the ability to view archived footage on mobile and other platforms and improved YouTube exporting.
There’s also a change to how long video will be saved for. Currently it’s saved for a week unless the user chooses the ‘save forever’ option. Automatic saves will now be stored for 60 days, but the ‘save forever’ option has been removed. A permanent save workaround is possible for ‘highlight’ clips of two hours or less.
