A big problem that viewers have had is that many times the audio in a gaming video would be muted because of the copyright laws regarding the music. In other words, a video of someone playing a game would violate the music copyright of the game because the video didn't have the rights to play it.
Needless to say, watching a video without the sound isn't remotely the same experience so Twitch has done something about it by making a library of 500 royalty-free songs available to play when that situation occurs.
The library leans towards EDM and features songs from both Skrillex and Steve Aoki's record labels as well as many indie labels. Aoki already has a relationship with Twitch, having performed the platform's first live concert in 2014.
Twitch, which is now owned by Amazon, plans to make music more prominent in the future by adding a new Music category for performances, and has even entered into an agreement with Beatport to host a channel.
YouTube went through a similar a similar problem with its Content ID feature before granting blanket licenses from major labels to video creators, and Twitch now hopes that the library will get around the same problem just as seamlessly.
1 comment:
My friends (I'm late 30's) think it's really weird that I watch other people play games on Twitch, but I love it. I'm into strategy based games where learning from watching people who are more skilled than you is a great way to get better.
The real trouble with Twitch and audio so far actually is rarely muting due to in-game music/sound but the music that streamers play to accompany their broadcasts. It's especially annoying when the stream gets muted on a "teaching" type stream, since that's where a lot of the value comes from, for both the streamer and the viewers.
I'm not sure if this step by Twitch will help much. Ideally, they'd be able to phase cancel out the copyrighted track in post and still retain enough of the streamer's voice for it to be useful. That or somehow tie in with Spotify etc. to allow for broadcast use.
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