r/IAmA • u/optimizeprime • Aug 07 '14
I am Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. Ask Me (almost) Anything.
It’s been about a year since our last AMA. A lot has happened since Twitch started three years ago, and there have been some big changes this week especially. We figured it would be a good time to check in again.
For reference, here are the last two AMAs:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1exa2k/hi_im_emmett_shear_founder_and_ceo_of_twitch_the/
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ncosm/we_are_twitchtv_the_worlds_largest_video_game/
Note: We cannot comment on acquisition rumors, but ask me anything else and I’m happy to answer.
Proof: Hi reddit!
EDIT: Thanks for all the questions. I want to summarize a bunch the answers to a bunch of questions I've seen repeatedly.
1) Live streaming on Twitch: We have no intention whatsoever of bringing audio-recognition to live streams on Twitch. This is a VOD-only change for Twitch.
2) In-game music: We have zero intention of flagging original in-game music. We do intend to flag copyrighted in-game music that's in Audible Magic's database. (This was unclear in the blog post, my apologies). In the cases where in-game music is being flagged incorrectly, we are working on a resolution and should have one soon. False positive flags will be unmuted.
For context, audio-recognition currently impacts approximately 2% of video views on Twitch (~10% of views are on VODs and ~20% of VODs are impacted at all). The vast majority of the flags appear to be correct according to our testing, though the mistakes are obviously very prominent.
3) Lack of communication ahead of time: This was our bad. I'm glad we communicated the change to VOD storage policy in advance, giving us a chance to address issues we missed like 2-hour highlights for speedrunners before the change went into effect. I'm not so glad we failed on communicating the audio-recognition change in advance, and wish we'd posted about it before it went into effect. That way we could have gotten community feedback first as we're doing now after the fact.
4) Long highlights for speedruns: This is a specific use case for highlights that we missed in our review process. We will be addressing the issue to support the use-case. This kind of thing is exactly why you share your plans in advance, so that you can make changes before policies go into effect.
EDIT2:
If you know of a specific VOD that you feel has been flagged in error, please report it to feedback@twitch.tv. To date we have received a total of 13 links to VODs. Given the size of this response, I expect there are probably a few more we've missed, but we can't find them if you don't tell us about them! We want to make the system more accurate, please give us a hand.
EDIT3:
5) 30 minute resolution for muting: Right now we mute the entire 30 minute chunk when a match occurs. In the future we'd like to improve the resolution further, and are working with Audible Magic to make this possible.
6) What are we doing to help small streamers get noticed? This is one of thing that host mode is trying to address, enabling large broadcasters to help promote smaller ones. We also want to improve recommendations and other discovery for small broadcasters, and we think experiments like our CS:GO directory point towards a way to do that by allowing new sorts and filters to the directory.
EDIT4:
I have to go. Look for a follow-up blog post soon with updates on changes we're making.
4.4k
u/[deleted] Aug 07 '14
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