Battlefield 4’s launch was not a good one. With all the server issues, game crashes and immersion-breaking bugs most people got turned off from it long before the patches came along to try and fix those issues, and what’s more, they gave the game a reputation that meant that fewer people wanted to buy it or take the risk of buying it.

Now however a week-long free trial of the game is being offered to people who might buy, but would prefer a risk-free try first. Starting from August 14th you will be able to download the trial from Origin; which includes the core game and its multiplayer.

What’s more, if by the end of the week you’re still playing and want more, there’s a sale on the game both in its normal and digital deluxe forms for 50% off the normal price. Buying the game together with Premium membership will net a 40% reduction and even the latest DLC patch is selling for 20% off right now.

Let’s hope for the sake of all who will be tempted by this freebie that the patches have actually made the game what it was meant to be in the first place.

Yesterday’s biggest news was the two changes to Twitch’s system of VODs, both in storage and the playing of third-party musics. For those of you who missed it, VOD storage time is now limited, highlights are only allowed to be 2 hours long and a system similar to Youtube’s Content ID system is now being employed to scan VODs (although not live broadcasts) for third-party music and muting 30-minutes blocks if it finds it.

In an AMA on Reddit a few hours ago, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear took on all questions. Except those about Google’s purchase of the streaming site, those were off-limits it seems. He did answer questions about Audible Magic, the company they’re running the new music identifying system with though. He also admitted that maybe they should have put out word of the new system before they implemented it; as it left streamers with very little time to take down problematic content for themselves of their own free will beforehand.

“Simply put: we screwed up and should have announced it ahead of time,” says Shear. “Sorry.”

He also says that the part of the blog post that talked about in-game and ambient music also being subject to content checks was poorly worded. Simply, he says that original in-game music will NOT be subject to checks and any that gets flagged will be quickly dealt with if the counter-notifications get filed. However background ambient music is subject to checks, so if you’re going to stream make sure to switch off all phones and hope no one turns on a television or radio within hearing range of the computer.

Shear said that the reason the system has been set up and is being rolled out now is due partly down to plans to bring VOD to other systems, such as the Twitch app on the Xbox consoles. As mentioned above, questions about Google were forbidden so how much of it is due to their influence is uncertain.

(Editor’s Note: The views in this article are entirely those of the author.)

Let’s get this out of the way first: If you are expecting me to rant and rail against the changes to Twitch, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Still here? Good. Let’s continue.

When Google announced that it had purchased Twitch, we all knew changes were going to happen. Some of them would be fore the best. Some of them wouldn’t. lets start with the good. Or, what I consider the good.

Twitch is completely overhauling the way it stores VODs.  Video on demand is not a huge part of Twitch, but it is a good way to catch up on what you might have missed while you were at the store, work or what have you. Still, Twitch is primarily a live platform, and many users, myself included, tend to ignore VOD as it doesn’t provide the same connection to the streamer and community as a live feed. That being said, some people do utilize the VOD aspect of Twitch. Until now, all VODs were stored in FLV format. Without getting to technical and as someone who does all of the station’s video production as well as my own channel, FLV SUCKS. Twitch is switching formats and VODs will now be viewable on mobile devices and consoles. Thats a big deal for Twitch. It might be a bid to expand the reach of VODs. Or it might be something that makes the “bad” part of the new changes easier for them to implement.

In addition to the format change, there are also changes to how videos are stored to begin with. Twitch discovered that a massive amount of VODs on the site (somewhere around 80% of their total storage capacity) were never watched. Literally, thats PETABYTES of wasted storage space. To address this, Twitch is changing the system. The save forever option is going away. It will be replaced with a more organized video manager. You will now have 14 days (if you have opted in to “Enable Archive Broadcasts” in your dashboard) to highlight videos before rolling storage removes them. Turbo subscribers and Twitch Partners get a max of 60 days to do this. This means that Twitch is trying to streamline their processes. And this is a good thing for users. Getting rid of petabytes of wasted space should improve our overall experience of the site. It forces streamers to either use it or lose it when it comes to highlights, meaning the viewer benefits by getting more content in the long run. And, the move to a new format means that we can now watch VODs on the go or on our consoles.

So, thats the good. Lets turn to the “bad”. You may notice that I keep putting bad in quotes. Theres a reason for that. Similar to YouTube…strike that. EXACTLY like YouTube, Twitch is now implementing an audio content matching system. In fact, Audible Magic is the same service YouTube used before it developed it’s own in house version for audio recognition. In a (extremely simplified) nutshell, Audible magic crawls all VODs on Twitch searching for copyrighted music in 30 minute blocks. If said music is found, the software mutes the audio of the VOD for that 30 minute block. Of course, as with YouTube, affected streamers can submit a claim arguing against the block. Let us be perfectly clear here: Audible Magic is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate. Even Twitch freely admits in their blog (found HERE ) that it may return fals positives or miss content from copyright owners that aren’t partnered with Audible Magic. Lets also be clear: This includes in-game AND ambient music. Let’s looks at this in two chunks, shall we?

Ambient Music: This means…commercial music. Let’s say you are playing DOTA2 on stream. Since you and your viewers have heard the music in DOTA2 a million times, you’ve turned it off and opted for some sweet Beyonce instead.  First off, I find your musical taste questionable. Clearly Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time” is FAR more appropriate to a fast paced game of DOTA2. That aside, you are essentially rebroadcasting music intended for private use. Especially if you are doing so using Pandora or Spotify. You see, Spotify or Pandora pay a microtransaction royalty fee every time an individual listener plays a song. If you rock out to Beyonce while playing for 10,000 people, only one payment has been made to that copyright/license holder. Meaning that the other 10,000 people are listening for free. The artist and copyright holder aren’t getting paid properly. And you…are breaking the law. And I can hear the arguments now. “But Digm, people have been doing it forever on Twitch!” Yes. Yes they have. The fact that people have been getting away with it does nothing to change the fact that it is still illegal. “But Digm! Sanitarium.fm does the same thing! You broadcast music to listeners over radio!” Yes. We do. However, we are recognized as a legitimate radio station and have gone through the necessary paperwork and licensing processes that allow us to broadcast as a radio station. Just like your local radio station. You’ll also notice that we do NOT play our own radio stream on our Twitch page. The reason for this is that the legality of that, even for a licensed radio station such as ourselves, is questionable. At best. So, to the ambient music part of the changes, my final thought is this: If you are a  streamer and you get hit with a copyright claim for playing commercial music in the background while you stream, you’ve brought it on yourself. You’ve broken a very clear set of laws under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (Yes, its a US law, but Twitch is based in the US, hence the law applies) and you have only the very shakiest of grounds upon which to base counter claims. I feel little to no sympathy for people caught in this predicament and personally am glad that Twitch is cracking down on this, as in the end it will help to protect us all from outside corporate attempts to crush new media.

In-Game Music: Ok. This one is a little trickier. We all know that Twitch exists solely for the purpose of streaming games. They’ve never made any bones about that. And one of the major parts of any game, particularly single player ones, is the music. The problem is that many studios might not hold exclusive claim to that music. Or the Audible Magic system might return a false positive. Take the recent International DOTA2 Championships. Valve composed the music in DOTA2. Valve owns the music in DOTA2. And Valve streamed content on Twitch of which it was the sole creator and owner. Audible Magic still muted huge portions of the tournament VODs on copyright claims. This is an example of a false positive. Its proof that not only is the system not perfect, but in many ways (just as YouTube’s) it is draconian to the extreme and rather broken. However, we have no choice but to live with it. That being said, there are many grey areas here. We are given permission to stream games on Twitch. Since music is considered an integral part of most games, there is a tacitly implied permission that the music is also acceptable for streaming. Furthermore, a argument could be made that removing the music from a game compromises the artistic integrity/vision of said game and is therefore open to retaliation from those that created said game. The problem is this: If you start down the road of saying that removing music from a game compromises the developer’s vision, its a very short hop to asserting that a streamer’s commentary ALSO compromises that vision. This is a highly imperfect system, and it gets even more complicated when you bring games like GTA and Saint’s Row into the mix. Games which feature real world commercial music prominently in their soundtracks. The in-game music question is a thorny one, with mostly imperfect answers. To that end, I will reserve judgement until further experience shows us how Twitch plans to play this out. that being said…there truly is some bad in the changes Twitch is making, and all of it centers heavily on the question of making in-game music subject to copyright games. Its not much of a reach to extend that claim to videos as well.

It remains to be seen what will happen in this regard, but you can rest assured I’ll be writing another of these articles in a few months time.

Last week’s release of the Plague Quarter was notable for two reasons. The more obvious and unintended one was the hiccups on launch that lasted well into the second day of its release. The other was that it marked the first time that Blizzard asked for money for anything besides Arena and packs of cards within Hearthstone. However it seems to have paid off for them.

According to the statistics last week was Hearthstone’s most popular on record, with loads of people logging in to play cards against the likes of the Plague Quarter bosses and take on its Class Challenges too. This bodes well for the future of any other planned expansions Blizzard might have had in the drawing up stages for Hearthstone’s future.

“The fact that last week was our strongest week ever for Hearthstone in terms of both revenue and engagement, I think, is a really strong sign,” Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. “I think that it really bodes very well for the engagement that we’ll be able to drive in the future with additional content for the game,”

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.