Exciting Changes Are Coming to Twitch.tv!

Want to stream yourself playing video games for other cretins? Twitch is pretty much your only option if you hope to reach a large audience. We've partnered with all the major console makers. We're on the verge of being acquired by Google. It's great.

Now we're making some changes. You might have heard about the first two, which seem to have ruffled some feathers. Read the rest, though. Keep an open mind. We believe these policies are a net positive for everyone in the futuristic medium of prolonged menu fiddling, saying "uhh", and pausing to look at a chat window every ten seconds.

When you decide to archive your streams, you might think that they will be, you know, archived. This is no longer the case. We are in the process of deleting old videos and only leaving portions as "highlights".

Those archives were taking up a lot of room. Keeping them around cost us dollars. There was absolutely no way to foresee this inevitable outcome, or to scale our business to account for it. Please understand that we simply do not have the resources to keep all those pointless videos on our servers.

We are using a shocking amount of resources to implement a petty Skynet that will listen to your videos for copyrighted songs. If it catches any unauthorized music, our very expensive system will mute an entire half hour chunk of the offending video.

For example, a crazy person might listen to some music in the background while streaming their game. This is unacceptable so our futuristic defensive measures will put a stop to it. Occasionally, a video game might contain music. Our advanced algorithm will listen for this video game music, recognize it as copyrighted, and mute that video. We are pleased to announce that we have already muted the recent official DOTA 2 International tournament videos because they included music from DOTA 2 in the video game being played, DOTA 2.

The benefits to streamers and viewers are super obvious so we won't even point them out.

If our supercomputer detects that you are playing a video game on your stream after 9PM local time, it will place a call to your mother to inform her that you are up past your bedtime.

 When a streamer's character stands still for more than ten seconds in a video game, our new power-saving technology will kick in. This shuts off the stream and deletes the streamer's account, which also frees up numerous bytes on our servers.

Up until now your username was your identity. It was your brand. It was every bit as important as the fact that you referred to yourself as a gamer. If someone wanted to see your videos they simply went to twitch.tv/GaltsAPoppin and bookmarked the page for future streams.

Now your username is an impossibly long string of random numbers. Better yet, it changes every twelve hours.

Our terrible flash-based video player has not been replaced, fixed, or improved in any way whatsoever. The newest version does, however, scan your computer for copyrighted programs then blur out their names and logos.

Streamers are still allowed to beg for donations from their viewers. The only change (and this is very minor, really) is that all donations will go directly to Twitch.

An advanced speech recognition algorithm will listen to streams for disparaging remarks about games published or created or sold by our corporate partners, then mute every stream on the site and replace all video feeds with a slow motion loop of NBA star Paul George breaking his leg.

Streams will now be restricted to two exciting video qualities. For our action-loving users who want to stream at 24 frames per second, there's Normal, which runs at a resolution of 362x21 at 10 frames per second. Those discerning users who value image quality above all else will want to choose the Mindblowing setting, which produces a single 720p still image every half hour.

 You guys are playing way too many games and watching way too many streams! Our new policy is to only allow the streaming of one game: Bad Day L.A.

Up to three streamers will be able to broadcast the game at any given time, each with a limit of ten viewers. Think of all the resources we'll free up!

– Twitch (@DennisFarrell)