Twitch has been bought by Google – we all knew that and it’s kind of old news. We assumed the worst for Twitch because while Google buying your company typically means you’ve got all kinds of new resources at your disposal – we’ve seen the kind of stuff that has happened with Youtube.

Twitch has announced some changes it’s making for VODs or Videos on Demand. VODs are saved livestream videos that you can go back and watch at a later time. One of the changes is that videos will not be saved forever, but rather only 60 days for premium members and 14 days for regular members. Highlights will be able to be stored indefinitely but they’re limited to 2 hours each. This has been quite the thorn in the side of a few Speedrunners and will end up with people splitting their past broadcasts into multiple highlights so that they’re saved indefinitely or just uploading them to youtube immediately after the stream ends.

Twitch will also be censoring VODs for infringing copyrighted sounds and music. Currently they state they are not scanning live broadcasts and isn’t any automatic takedowns of live content currently in place. We’ve all seen how well the automated copyright bots work on Youtube and it’s no surprise that Twitch is already experiencing false positives left and right. Even Twitch’s own Twitch Weekly broadcasts are being flagged and censored. Even the DOTA 2’s VOD of the international has been censored for having music from DOTA 2 in the video. People are having their VODs muted left and right for having in-game music that is triggering the automatic copyright flag.

Bring some popcorn because this is getting buttery.