Haven't heard of hitbox before, great there is now an alternative to Twitch. There were rumors that Google wants to buy Twitch (parent company already closed Justin.tv)
But today Amazon.com has agreed to acquire Twitch for more than $1 billion.
Friendly reminder: rumors that Google is going to buy Twitch are still just that -- rumors. Nothing has been announced, and there are new rumors that Amazon is now thinking about a purchase [1].
Twitch is in the middle of a media fiasco resulting in policy changes.
Hitbox and other twitch like platforms already existed but are enjoying people mass moving from twitch.
:.:.:
>What happened?
Twitch introduced a new service to flag copyrighted music, and. The problem is a lot of games have copyrighted music inside of them, so a lot of music was cut out of footage simply because you couldn't stream the music, just the games footage.
Valve actually had most the sound removed from their "The International" DotA2 tournament. Because in-game music was owned by Valve. As an example. Even twitch's own podcasts were flaged and muted due to this.
Twitch started enforcing a 30second + stream delay, which angered both Users and Streamers. Since it removed the instant feedback/conversation from the stream.
Twitch also deleted terabytes of recorded video on a policy change.
The issue wasn't so much that, they were taking copyright seriously. Its how they handled taking copyright seriously.
Their practice was Draconian, even if the streamer owned the copy right, they still have to appeal to have their content posted. Even twitch took down their own videos explain how this system works, due to copyrighted music.
This has been going on for >2 weeks without much change.
I think it must be clarified that only archived videos (often referred to as VODs) are affected by the copyright music detection. Live streaming is not affected in any way currently. This is relevant because viewing of VODs is quite rare on Twitch (I say this as someone who almost exclusively views VODs on Twitch so as to regain time control.) The Twitch streamers I'm aware of are not that bothered because they consider their streams ephemeral and aren't concerned by the archived copies. Any streamer who feels differently can save their content locally and upload to Youtube or other such service. Of course Youtube also has issues with copyrighted content.
Another disclaimer: I stream on Twitch occasionally and post much of my streamed content to Youtube.
The difference is YouTube is on at least a couple magnitudes larger scale. Furthermore, YouTube doesn't create content and host that, it only hosts the content, allowing for a much easier way to share copy-written material. On Twitch, the things they are muting are recorded videos of streams of their own site. Note the difference here. There's not an easy way to take say a movie and upload it to twitch VoDs in a reasonable amount of time. Lastly, the entire VoD is muted, even if its background music, game music, etc. and most of the time the key sound element is the streamer himself/herself, which is completely lost with muting system. Also why can they not just respond to DMCA requests? There is nothing that has been shown that they are receiving an inordinate amount of DMCA requests that would be impossible to handle with a more refined approach.
Hitbox is only popular because it isn't Twitch (in the same vein as Facebook and Google+ a couple years back)
Specifically, Hitbox has laxer policies regarding non-gaming content [which is relevant in this case], better streaming quality, and lower stream delay.
