Youtube Gaming failing early?

[Mattinator]

As you probably have caught on to by now, Youtube launched its gaming service to rival Twitch recently. However, the launch has come with some heavy criticism, especially over criticism over its content takedown system, and the inability for some countries to access content (source).

 

Youtube's platform for gaming, which would include streaming, was kind of a big deal as Twitch has held dominance over live streaming of gaming for a while now, especially in the West. There are a couple of services out of Korea or China which have come in the last couple of years, but for English speaking users, Twitch has been, and still is, dominant. Thus, the news that Youtube would be entering that market was a significant deal and many people were excited about it, even if it was just so that Twitch would feel pressure to lift the quality of the service they offer (features, platform, etc).

 

However, the new platform has been slammed early over issues with its copyright take down system. This system has been known to be overzealous and easily abused for years, but has continued just because of how large Youtube is. However, with this venture they're entering a new market, where they are a little fish compared to the whale that is Twitch.tv, And as such has been brought into the light again. Taking down entire past streams and issuing copyright strikes against streamers is liable to kill off any desire to use Youtube's streaming services, especially when such strikes can probably take down their Youtube channel altogether (I assume, not confirmed).

 

This system is also significantly worse for streamers than Twitch's policy, which is designed to just mute any audio for the duration that the copyrighted work is playing on the vod. While this system is also not perfect, and can false positives or overly extends mute times, it is still much better than losing access to your Youtube channel, and all income from monetised videos AND streaming, because of an overzealous blocker and/or a developer who decides they don't like your face.

 

Also an issue is the restrictions on certain countries from accessing certain content that people have experienced, which has also been going on for years on Youtube itself, but is also a restriction that Twitch doesn't seem to face.

 

Twitch doesn't seem to be phased by the competition - this tweet even makes light of the new competitor in game streaming.

 

So, LTT community, what do you think will come of this? Will this situation force Youtube to improve its copyright strike system? Will the competition force Twitch, which has often dragged its feet on improvements, to start pumping out more? Or will this just be an expensive mistake for Youtube?

Aside: Is there somewhere in particular to submit ideas for topics for the WAN show? Or do they just go through different topics on the boards, and others that they find? I feel like this is an interesting one to talk about.

[ShadowCaptain]

its to early to tell, it depends how serious YouTube are about it, if they are serious they may change their stance on certain issues

 

If they are not serious it will just die if they dont address the issues

[HKZeroFive]

YouTube needs to be more lenient on copyright, otherwise it's virtually a dumbed down, censored Twitch. At this rate, YouTube Gaming is going to die out like Google+

[ZetZet]

Region lock completely killed it for me. What's the point of doing that? I will just wait for twitch to switch to html5 thx.

[DudeWazap]

I still think it is too early to tell for sure.

[AddonCustoms]

So far from the couple of hours I spent on it, I already prefer it to Twitch. For some annoying reason Twitch buffers every few minutes for me while watching a stream, making it annoying and unwatchable, managed to watch a stream on youtube gaming and had 0 issues in those 2 hours, no buffering at all.   (Before anyone mentions my connection its 160 down and 12 up, so that isn't the issue.)

[Mattinator]

So far from the couple of hours I spent on it, I already prefer it to Twitch. For some annoying reason Twitch buffers every few minutes for me while watching a stream, making it annoying and unwatchable, managed to watch a stream on youtube gaming and had 0 issues in those 2 hours, no buffering at all.   (Before anyone mentions my connection its 160 down and 12 up, so that isn't the issue.)

 

If it could avoid problems, I'd prefer it as a viewer to Twitch too. Twitch has weird server issues, especially outside the US. I'm from Australia, and sometimes with Twitch I can watch on Source quality at peak US times, sometimes I get weird buffering issues at less demanding times.

I can't imagine choosing to stream on Youtube as it currently stands though, which is a problem - if you can't attract streamers, you don't have content, you don't get viewers. If Twitch can finally get its HTML5 upgrade done, and Youtube can't fix some of these issues, this would be trouble for Youtube Gaming.

[Itereus]

I'm kinda torn on this. Competition for Twitch is a good thing, as a good competitive market favours consumers. On the other hand, if Google and Twitch partnered, promoting each other, making it easier for Twitch users to put up stuff on Youtube, and for Youtubers to stream (direct link to the stream, embedded player etc.) it would be great.

 

I feel more big players are needed in the streaming industry, although fragmented streaming is not exactly good either. We'll just have to see in the coming months if people adopt Youtube Gaming, or if it's going to end up a niche market.

[pk-man]

As long as youtube doesn't fix their broke ass contentID system, youtube gaming will never be able to compete with Twitch.

[Will_Man_Dude]

A large problem that youtube gaming has is that Non of the bigger streams that I watch like iijeriichoii, timthetatman, goldy, or syndicate as well as any of the top tier esports will likely ever go to youtube gaming. This is because of how big of a foothold twitch has on the streaming market. So if they did stream on youtube gaming there won't be the thousands of viewers and without thousands of viewers they can't stay in the business of streaming.

[RagnarokDel]

there's already channels with over 10k viewers live.

[tsk]

I'm kinda torn on this. Competition for Twitch is a good thing, as a good competitive market favours consumers. On the other hand, if Google and Twitch partnered, promoting each other, making it easier for Twitch users to put up stuff on Youtube, and for Youtubers to stream (direct link to the stream, embedded player etc.) it would be great.

 

I feel more big players are needed in the streaming industry, although fragmented streaming is not exactly good either. We'll just have to see in the coming months if people adopt Youtube Gaming, or if it's going to end up a niche market.

Twitch is owned by Amazon, I guess I don't need to tell you any collaboration with google is out of the question.

[Arty]

YouTube needs to be more lenient on copyright, otherwise it's virtually a dumbed down, censored Twitch. At this rate, YouTube Gaming is going to die out like Google+

its not youtube thats bashing on the copyrights.

its all the other companies forcing youtube to do it.

[Arty]

Will the WAN show be steamed on this?

the wan show should be dual streamed youtube/twitch.

[RagnarokDel]

the wan show should be dual streamed youtube/twitch.

they have the upload speed for it, not sure how easy it is to dualstream on one machine, altho it's probably possible when you're not actually gaming

[silberdrachi]

My problem with it is its really confusing. The interface has little differentiation between whats being streamed and whats pre-recorded. Its very cluttered and everything seems to be all over the place. And this is coming from google who used to be the gods of minimalist web page design.

 

I love the quality, everything runs butter smooth when you watch, but damn that UI looks like a hot mess.

[silberdrachi]

Will the WAN show be steamed on this?

 

Not likely, because they have a partner agreement with Twitch and i am willing to bet that includes clauses about not using alternate streaming sites. (Or at least if i was Twitch's lawyers i would've demanded that clause)

[Snickerzz]

So far from the couple of hours I spent on it, I already prefer it to Twitch. For some annoying reason Twitch buffers every few minutes for me while watching a stream, making it annoying and unwatchable, managed to watch a stream on youtube gaming and had 0 issues in those 2 hours, no buffering at all.   (Before anyone mentions my connection its 160 down and 12 up, so that isn't the issue.)

same, whenever i watch hour+ streams it seems to just randomly start buffering even at lowest quality

[Arty]

thats gunna course more problems

@RagnarokDel

Not likely, because they have a partner agreement with Twitch and i am willing to bet that includes clauses about not using alternate streaming sites. (Or at least if i was Twitch's lawyers i would've demanded that clause)

i remember linus saying on the wan show, that he was just to lazy to put the youtube url into xsplit.

[EChondo]

As I have said in another thread, if YouTube doesn't change it's copyright policies the service is dead in the water. There's no point using YouTube and getting copyright strikes and takedown notices when you can use Twitch and they'll just mute anything it catches on the VoD and not mess with the streamer. Content creators that could, have moved away from YouTube because of these stupid policies, so I don't see anyone coming back if they are still in effect.
 

So far from the couple of hours I spent on it, I already prefer it to Twitch. For some annoying reason Twitch buffers every few minutes for me while watching a stream, making it annoying and unwatchable, managed to watch a stream on youtube gaming and had 0 issues in those 2 hours, no buffering at all.   (Before anyone mentions my connection its 160 down and 12 up, so that isn't the issue.)

It's the opposite for me, I haven't been able to watch a YouTube stream at all. Twitch plays just fine though. It might be because I'm in the U.S. and you're in the UK? Which would be weird...
 

[DEDRICK]

Not likely, because they have a partner agreement with Twitch and i am willing to bet that includes clauses about not using alternate streaming sites. (Or at least if i was Twitch's lawyers i would've demanded that clause)

 

They don't have partner.  

 

Also streaming to both Twitch and Youtube doesn't require double the bandwidth.  Restream.io

[ACatWithThumbs]

It's to early to tell it isn't even available in some countries currently like Germany.

[othertomperson]

I tried to record Far Cry 3 once to demo how my GPUs faired at 4K, but I failed when I tried to join a couple of clips together because of a copyright claim for Ride of the Valkyries on the on-rails helicopter part. I don't know how litigious Wagner is these days but his music ought to be public domain by now considering he died 132 years ago.

 

Which is the other problem with YouTube's copyright system, is that it's automated to all hell and contesting strikes from its own system in even ridiculous cases like this seems to be nigh on impossible.

[totjup5]

I think most of the active twitch community will stay on twitch because it is superior. However I think youtube gaming will be popular with newcomers to streaming.

[spartaman64]

there are also lots of take downs with twitch