Twitch Offers Video Uploading, Rivaling YouTube
By Sarah Fields 30 September 2016
Twitch officially announces an open beta of a new video uploading service, allowing its users to upload pre-made content for viewers to watch, rivaling YouTube’s market.
Many gamers have found a way to support themselves financially playing video games, either by streaming live or uploading pre-recorded Let’s Play videos. Twitch has now officially revealed that it’s looking to get in on the action that YouTube typically reigns over, unveiling a service to upload pre-made videos.
On the official Twitch blog, Product Marketing Manager Noreen McInnis announced that Twitch will now start allowing content creators to permanently upload videos in addition to using its normal streaming services. For now, the service is in the beta stages, but all users are allowed to participate and upload videos. In addition, users are encouraged to leave comments and feedback for the Twitch development team with any ideas on how to make the service better, or to alert the team to bugs users have discovered.
Twitch and YouTube have been in competition for some time to control the video game streaming and Let’s Play markets. YouTube’s parent company, Google, made an effort to purchase Twitch, but ultimately lost out to Amazon instead, which acquired Twitch for $970 million. YouTube has since gone on to introduce its own game streaming service, and has offered live streams of major gaming events, like E3. However, Twitch is still arguably the preferred streaming service of the two, with most gamers uploading static content to YouTube but keeping their streams on Twitch.
Although some content creators are probably set in their ways, there is a possibility that Twitch could potentially steal some of YouTube’s action. While YouTube has recently made an effort to support users who receive copyright claims, many users have been discouraged by the threat of gaming content being taken down via Content ID claims. While Twitch does have some fairly strict rules regarding music used and has banned some games from streaming, some gamers may gladly switch to uploading their work on Twitch in an effort to protect their work from being taken offline.
YouTube has made many content creators nervous recently by introducing the YouTube Heroes program, which is designed to reward users for flagging videos that contain stolen content. This may be a prime time for Twitch to try and offer YouTube’s game-related content creators a different option. Of course, with most existing content creators deeply steeped in YouTube, it remains to be seen how many will try to migrate to Twitch.
What do you think about the new Twitch upload service? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: Twitch
