We should probably talk about the Twitch changes.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > We should probably talk about the Twitch changes.

«‹›3 »

Hypocrisy: Oct 4, 2006; Lord of Sarcasm

Michaellaneous posted:

1. I would be much happier if twitch wouldn't be run by a bunch of prepubertary furries.

2. That being said, I hope that googles buys twitch, so that it either gets completely worthless or actually becomes better in terms of quality, speed and video implemention.

That being said, hitbox seems to be pretty promising so far.

Isn't hitbox owned by scammers?

# ? Aug 7, 2014 14:38

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 20, 2024 07:28

WirelessPillow: Jan 12, 2012; Look Ma, no wires!

Hypocrisy posted:

Isn't hitbox owned by scammers?

Yes and their website doesn't mute anything or have a 30 second delay so nobody cares.

# ? Aug 7, 2014 14:44

Chalks: Sep 30, 2009

WirelessPillow posted:

Yes and their website doesn't mute anything or have a 30 second delay so nobody cares.

Are they actually the same guys though? Some people are saying they are and others are saying they are people who were involved in own3d but left before all that crap. Does anyone know what's actually going on there?

To be fair though, if twitch taking a hit on viewers as a result of this stupidity causes them to reverse course, I don't give a poo poo who's running the competitor that's causing it.

# ? Aug 7, 2014 14:51

dragon enthusiast: Jan 1, 2010

Hypocrisy posted:

Isn't hitbox owned by scammers?

Based on what they've said the only relationship hitbox has with own3d.tv is
- the CTO who just did back end stuff
- the guy who was brought in to try to make own3d solvent who went "lol no you guys are hosed I'm out of here"

I don't know how accurate that is though.

# ? Aug 7, 2014 14:55

Pirate Jet: May 2, 2010

Blazing Zero posted:

No 'professional' streamers will move to hitbox thanks to the owned scam. These people are living off of the community they built and so long as the live broadcasting portion remains functional, there is no reason for them to risk their livelihood.

For pro streamers I can see that, but this change just absolutely kneecapped speedrunners, who kind of run one of the biggest online charity events every year. I honestly don't see this system staying in place after the backlash they're getting, but if it does, you'd be an idiot to think that speedrunners won't take their business elsewhere. https://twitter.com/cosmowright/status/497150107289407489

The Twitch AMA is going on right now. Cosmo Wright is the top-rated comment.

# ? Aug 7, 2014 19:17

Another Person: Oct 21, 2010

To make it easier to view because I don't like Reddit formatting:

Cosmo Wright posted:

Dear Twitch,
I've loved your site before its inception, back when it was only Justin.tv's gaming section. It's thanks to your service that I was able to turn my passion into a dream job.
However, several implemented changes to the site has made the site a worse experience. The streaming delay was the final straw for a lot of people, but I had faith that Twitch knew best. Around this time I was in San Francisco, and some Twitch employees told me in person that this change was necessary in order to maintain a profitable business, despite it hurting the quality of the site. Fine, whatever. I'll deal with it.
Deleting all past broadcasts and limiting highlights to 2 hours was extremely disappointing, and I hoped that workarounds were potentially possible and that you would listen to us. Yesterday myself, some speedrunners, and some Twitch staff members had a Skype conversation about this. Twitch staff were rather opposed to lengthening the Highlight VODs because of storage concerns, despite deleting petabytes of past broadcasts.
Breaking up highlights reminds me of when we had to record our speedruns in 2 hour chunks via DVD recorder. A bad limitation of old technology. Yet here we are in 2014 and we are having our content once again broken up into 2 hour segments. This severely impacts the usability of highlights. I have legitimate use cases for long highlights, as we archive our best speedrun times and use the VOD as proof. See: http://zeldaspeedruns.com/leaderboards/tww/any.
Forget all that, though. The 2 hour highlight limit is nothing compared to Content ID matching.
Applying Content ID matches on gaming music on a site that was built to stream videogames is absurd. Game music directly from the capture of the game itself is being taken down all over. Dealing with YouTube's overzealous policies on gaming content has been one of the most obnoxious things I've experienced as a content creator, and one of the reasons Twitch felt like home to me is because it's supposed to be a website focused on gaming content creation.
It certainly doesn't seem to be working out like that, though. Maybe it is due to needing to keep the company sustainable. Maybe it is fear of copyright issues now that Twitch has grown so much. Whatever it is, it is significantly impacting the user experience.
I have cancelled all my subscriptions and I will not renew Turbo. I am currently looking for alternative sites to stream on (perhaps hitbox.tv). The least I can do is give an alternative site a try, even if it hurts my income. I do hope an alternate site could work out, because Twitch has a near-monopoly on live gaming content at the moment.
I'm simply finding it rather hard to support a site that is so afraid of a legal grey-area that it pre-emptively begins to sabotage a large portion of its user base.
My question to you: Why should I keep streaming on Twitch as opposed to a different site that has none of these issues?
-Cosmo Wright

Twitch CEO 'optimizeprime' Emmett Shear posted:

W/ regard to 2 hour chunks:
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.
W/ regard to content id:
Hey Cosmo, I understand your feelings here. 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.
W/ regards to your last question, why Twitch:
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.
PS: I don't think your VODs are being flagged right now, but I realize that doesn't help anyone else getting caught in the crossfire.

e; my impression on why they see nobody using highlight for longer than 2 hours: because it was labelled 'highlight'. You reserve the highlight for the big moments, whilst having the whole piece still available for viewing alongside it. That gives the viewer options. 'Do you want to watch the big bits, or the whole thing?' There is no such thing as a 8 hour highlight as that is a poor and confusing use of terms, so nobody did it.

Also, the because we care piece, whilst possibly well founded, sounds so pandering to me. I am just cynical of what anyone labelled CEO says though.

e2;

optimizeprime posted:

We have absolutely no intention of running any audio recognition against live video, period.

... so they want to pursue copyright claims, but only half way? They will allow people to break the copyright law as long as they don't see it, basically. That is a very dumb policy which makes no sense.

Another Person fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Aug 7, 2014

# ? Aug 7, 2014 19:28

Photex: Apr 6, 2009

Another Person posted:

... so they want to pursue copyright claims, but only half way? They will allow people to break the copyright law as long as they don't see it, basically. That is a very dumb policy which makes no sense.

it would cost a lot more to monitor and scrape live than it does to scrape an archive.

# ? Aug 7, 2014 19:43

Another Person: Oct 21, 2010

Photex posted:

it would cost a lot more to monitor and scrape live than it does to scrape an archive.

I know that, but their reasoning for starting this policy is to be on the right side of copyright law, but are totally okay with being on the wrong side as it happens. It wouldn't work on practice, but on principal that is a very dumb policy.

# ? Aug 7, 2014 19:46

Niton: Oct 21, 2010; Your Lord and Savior has finally arrived!

..got any kibble?

Another Person posted:

To make it easier to view because I don't like Reddit formatting:

e; my impression on why they see nobody using highlight for longer than 2 hours: because it was labelled 'highlight'. You reserve the highlight for the big moments, whilst having the whole piece still available for viewing alongside it. That gives the viewer options. 'Do you want to watch the big bits, or the whole thing?' There is no such thing as a 8 hour highlight as that is a poor and confusing use of terms, so nobody did it.

Highlight is relevant - if I do something that takes 3 hours 100 times and finally get the result I wanted, then the whole 3 hours is absolutely a highlight. When some of your earliest power users (including people you use your official Twitter feed to advertise) do things like that (Cosmo? SDA? Even Sig, sorta), maybe you should make sure they don't feel left out in the cold when you're taking an axe to your system?

# ? Aug 7, 2014 19:52

Pirate Jet: May 2, 2010

Photex posted:

it would cost a lot more to monitor and scrape live than it does to scrape an archive.

Even so, Shear states in the AMA that he refuses to scrape live video for copyright, even if the technology ever became available. Which is... kinda morally backwards?

# ? Aug 7, 2014 19:57

Another Person: Oct 21, 2010

Niton posted:

Highlight is relevant - if I do something that takes 3 hours 100 times and finally get the result I wanted, then the whole 3 hours is absolutely a highlight. When some of your earliest power users (including people you use your official Twitter feed to advertise) do things like that (Cosmo? SDA? Even Sig, sorta), maybe you should make sure they don't feel left out in the cold when you're taking an axe to your system?

Oh, I was not suggesting that. They stated they never saw people using 2 hour plus highlights often, I was just suggesting a reason why they probably never saw much of it. The word highlight, to me, implies 'short'. One high point of a long piece. When your service offers a format to highlight short bits of streams, whilst also allowing you to save extended pieces then of course you won't get people highlighting whole 8 hour videos. They will pick the short bit, and still offer the full piece as an option. Their reasoning for making highlight that length, according to their reasoning, is based on their findings in research, which were based on the time when they did not delete saved content. They are saying nobody made 2+ hour highlights is their reason for giving it a limitation, when there was an actual alternative to highlights at the time that made more sense if you wanted longer videos.

Without saved content, highlight is absolutely relevant.

# ? Aug 7, 2014 20:10

koolkal: Oct 21, 2008; Can't post for 7 hours!

Live video scraping is more expensive since you have to do it within a certain time frame on all current playing streams. Scraping old videos lets you use whatever overhead you have. And they can make this argument pretty easily if the people pushing the copyright try to take them to court for not pursuing copyright protection.

# ? Aug 7, 2014 20:15

Another Person: Oct 21, 2010

Would that hold up though?

# ? Aug 7, 2014 20:57

The Kins: Oct 2, 2004

Twitch have budged a little. They've removed the 2-hour limit on VODs and added an "appeal" button for false copyright flagging.

# ? Aug 8, 2014 04:53

virtualboyCOLOR: Dec 22, 2004

Whatever makes nerds angry I support. Great changes Twitch.

# ? Aug 8, 2014 04:54

Catts: Nov 3, 2011

So is the deleting old videos thing going to be site wide? I have so many videos I need to watch, I'll never finish them all :smith:

# ? Aug 8, 2014 10:19

Wiggly Wayne DDS: Sep 11, 2010

Catts posted:

So is the deleting old videos thing going to be site wide? I have so many videos I need to watch, I'll never finish them all

Yes, you can get the location of the broadcast recordings here and download them for local viewing.

# ? Aug 8, 2014 11:11

Katana Gomai: Jan 14, 2007; "Thus," concluded Miyamoto, "you must give up everything you have to be my disciple."

Meme Emulator posted:

Should I pay Spalding every time my high school basketball team makes money because they allowed me to use thier ball?

Holy gently caress that might be the dumbest "analogy" I've ever seen.

# ? Aug 8, 2014 18:38

aerion111: Nov 29, 2011; Prodigy of Curiosity.
Master of Jacks.
Apprentice of Masks.
And, when fighting the forces of darkness, always remember: "Armor of Darkness, Weapon of Light"

Catts posted:

So is the deleting old videos thing going to be site wide? I have so many videos I need to watch, I'll never finish them all

Yeah, I'm not a big fan either.
I have little to no interest in the streaming side of Twitch, since I'm neither there at the right times nor feel like watching someone mine stone for half an hour (something I could skip past in a less-than-live scenario)
To me it's just somewhere to get large unedited chunks of video (even when people cross-post to Youtube, they cut the 3-hour stream down to maybe 4-5 videos of 15 minutes each, and it can take over a week for the last of the videos to be posted)
Which means I want them to keep the videos around just as long as Youtube, since I use them as if they were already Youtube (just with a preference towards longer videos, and with a 'chat' to help people not get horribly stuck)

# ? Aug 8, 2014 18:58

Mr.Unique-Name: Jul 5, 2002

To be fair, severely limiting their archives actually does make a decent amount of sense from a business standpoint with the cost of maintaining them. It sucks though. I like being able to go back to older GDQ marathons and rewatch some of the runs.

# ? Aug 8, 2014 19:02

SoapyTarantula: Jun 3, 2011; Lipstick Apathy

A video of me playing Arma 2 with goons a while back was muted for containing content (read: gun shots and explosions) from Arma 2. Yet a video of me playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 while listening to some Polish radio station blast Rammstein is perfectly okay. :wtc:

# ? Aug 8, 2014 19:11

Pirate Jet: May 2, 2010

Mr.Unique-Name posted:

To be fair, severely limiting their archives actually does make a decent amount of sense from a business standpoint with the cost of maintaining them. It sucks though. I like being able to go back to older GDQ marathons and rewatch some of the runs.

The good news for you is that SDA puts the GDQ marathons on YouTube, too.

Twitch has made some changes to their plans. Highlights can now have an indefinite length, and an appeal system has been added for VOD mutes. I think I'm okay with the new VOD system - it's a little bit of a bummer, but I can understand it if they need the resources - but even with an appeal button, the mute system is some dumbass "guilty until proven innocent" bullshit.

I have to agree with the article posted earlier that this is more likely a result of the Google deal falling through than anything. If Google can host YouTube, I think they can handle a site with less than a tenth of its traffic.

Pirate Jet fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Aug 8, 2014

# ? Aug 8, 2014 19:11

Ellieanna: Jul 16, 2014

K8.0 posted:

The only real alternative right now is hitbox, which is run by the scammers who ran own3d. There will probably be some growth of competition, but really this is just the end of the golden age of game streaming. I hope you like your streams as vanilla and boring as your youtube content!

Azubu is still working on their stream service. They aren't half bad. My issue with it is the lack of mobile app (it was supposed to be released in July) and they have limited streamers on it due to still being in Beta. Maybe with the Twitch changes, they might push more. I know they aren't amazing, but at least it's something. It's better then mute.

# ? Aug 9, 2014 00:36

Konstantin: Jun 20, 2005; And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

Easiest thing would be for Twitch to keep partner videos or videos with more than around 100 views forever. They will still delete 99% of videos and save space, but with much less community backlash.

# ? Aug 9, 2014 10:32

Michaellaneous: Oct 30, 2013

Konstantin posted:

Easiest thing would be for Twitch to keep partner videos or videos with more than around 100 views forever. They will still delete 99% of videos and save space, but with much less community backlash.

That would be sensible.

# ? Aug 9, 2014 11:07

Chalks: Sep 30, 2009

Konstantin posted:

Easiest thing would be for Twitch to keep partner videos or videos with more than around 100 views forever. They will still delete 99% of videos and save space, but with much less community backlash.

Yeah, or simply allow channels with a certain number of subscribers to keep archives around forever. I understand that some kid playing minecraft for 10 hours with zero viewers saving his video history is probably a massive waste of space, but there are people on twitch who regularly get 15,000 viewers when live and all of their past broadcasts have at 2-3k views.

Their one size fits all approach doesn't make very much sense at all.

# ? Aug 9, 2014 11:16

Det_no: Oct 24, 2003

They just handled things in the most retarded way possible, really. They could very well have said "Ok guys, in one month we are going to implement this and this and that. Please backup whatever you want to keep (OR "well let you keep X amount of videos") and consider that from this particular date onwards we will check VOD audio content"

And that's loving it. People would have complained as well but at least it wouldn't have caused a shitstorm. I wonder if whoever was thinking of purchasing Twitch banged his head at how they handled things.

# ? Aug 9, 2014 11:16

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

Another Person posted:

I know that, but their reasoning for starting this policy is to be on the right side of copyright law, but are totally okay with being on the wrong side as it happens. It wouldn't work on practice, but on principal that is a very dumb policy.

Their reasoning for starting the policy is to avoid being sued by being able to claim they're trying really hard. Their publicly announced reason is wanting to be ethically upstanding.

# ? Aug 9, 2014 12:07

sauer kraut: Oct 2, 2004

Photex posted:

Honestly streamers need to take note from Destiny and just stop caring about ad revenue . What he did was genius and ahead of the curve. He moved his whole subscriber base to a personal website (Destiny.gg) and just uses twitch embedded, he can now basically move to anywhere he wants without losing any subs

Ad revenue is pathetic anyway. Some streamer talked about it, twitch pockets 90-95% of it and you're lucky to get 1/10 of a penny per actual view.
It's all about the subs (of which twitch only keeps about half) and donations. Also uploading VODs to youtube who pay a lot better.

sauer kraut fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Aug 9, 2014

# ? Aug 9, 2014 12:50

Photex: Apr 6, 2009

sauer kraut posted:

Ad revenue is pathetic anyway

this was not the case a few years ago when these people were making over $500 a day in just ad revenue.

# ? Aug 9, 2014 12:53

virtualboyCOLOR: Dec 22, 2004

Catts posted:

So is the deleting old videos thing going to be site wide? I have so many videos I need to watch, I'll never finish them all

What the gently caress is wrong with you?

# ? Aug 9, 2014 13:42

Khorne: May 1, 2002

Det_no posted:

They just handled things in the most retarded way possible, really. They could very well have said "Ok guys, in one month we are going to implement this and this and that. Please backup whatever you want to keep (OR "well let you keep X amount of videos") and consider that from this particular date onwards we will check VOD audio content"

And that's loving it. People would have complained as well but at least it wouldn't have caused a shitstorm. I wonder if whoever was thinking of purchasing Twitch banged his head at how they handled things.

There would still be a backlash because there's no legal reason for them to be doing this. Twitch is already compliant with the DMCA and is not liable for anything contained in the user videos provided they remove them as takedown requests come. Which they do, but there's really not many takedown requests at all because no one gives a poo poo about twitch vods except the twitch community.

They're implementing this for future business reasons but not for legal ones. Which doesn't make sense to me unless they expect the game industry to start filing claims on Twitch content and for them to share revenue with the game industry. Which sounds somewhat unlikely, and even giving them a vehicle to do that when twitch is the best free marketing they have seems sketchy to me.

Khorne fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Aug 10, 2014

# ? Aug 10, 2014 03:45

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 20, 2024 07:28

Ometeotl: Feb 13, 2012; It's MISSEL! Or SISSLE!
I confused myself...

Not to mention, both Xbox One and PS4 have Twitch streaming built in...

# ? Aug 10, 2014 04:18

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > We should probably talk about the Twitch changes.

«‹›3 »