With the news of Google's purchase of Twitch becoming official about a week ago, streamers have waited for the news of changes to come through. And today it seems that those changes have been revealed to the users. There's two big ones: the first limits the length of highlights and the amount of time a broadcast can be stored, the other brings the first wave of content copyright checks to them.
The first announcement came through in the middle of the day, in which a blog post informed the reader that most stored broadcasts are not watched much after the first two weeks of existing. In order to cut down on the amount of stored footage the decision has been made that from now on all broadcasts will not be stored longer than 14 days for non-Turbo subscribers and Turbo subscribers can have theirs last for up to 60 days. This is a change from the old system that previously only stored a broadcast for 3 days if it wasn't highlighted but then kept it forever if it was. Highlights however will last forever, but are now limited to just 2 hours long; possibly to ease their exporting over to Youtube channels if the streamer wishes to share them there.
The second announcement has met with slightly more controversy. 'Audio Recognition' will be implemented to scan stored VODs for music owned by third-parties, doing it in blocks of 30 minutes and triggering an auto-mute for sections that are found to have matching musics from the library of Audible Magic; the company Twitch is running the system with. And the blog post makes it clear that this will include in-game music too. Muted broadcasts will be exportable but will remain muted over on Youtube as well. similar to Youtube's Content ID system, users who wish to dispute any auto-muting will have to file a counter-notification and will do so at their own risk.
Twitch have asked for feedback for these new policies and are asking for all questions to be directed to them via comments or through either of these two events:
Reddit AMA on /r/Twitch: Thursday, August 7, 10:30am PST
Twitch Weekly: Friday, August 8 at 2pm PST
So if you have any strong thoughts, these would be the places to make them heard.