A couple of days ago I received an email from Twitch regarding DMCA copyright issues on VOD and clips. The main purpose was to let users know that if they play copyright music on livestreams it can get removed.

“We recently received a batch of DMCA takedown notifications with about 1,000 individual claims from music publishers. … The only way to protect yourself from DMCA notifications is to not stream music – or other copyrighted material – you do not have rights to.” TWITCH

At present, this will only effect past streams and will not cause any issues while broadcasting live, but if things don’t change then it will potentially mean the end of DJ livestreams on Twitch.

I have just read an interesting article from the people at Mixcloud and they have a platform where you can livestream and the artists receive royalties when their tracks are played.

I have been using Mixcloud for a while now for streaming the audio from past twitch episodes and I will soon be testing it out for doing livestreaming.

I have looked into it a bit and at present it doesn’t have the full features that are available on Twitch, but in the next few months that may all change.

I have also been looking into another service at Hearthis.at/live – They don’t have any limitations on the broadcast quality or bitrate, but the chat features on it are not as intuitive.

At present I will be sticking to twitch and hope they can sort out the issues.