Twitch Streamers Are Furious About New Mid-Stream Ads

Booga1 writes:

Kotaku reports disgruntled streamers are complaining about Twitch adding ads to the middle of live streamed videos.

In an ideal world, ads would be kept to a minimum, allowed only on the backs of magazines people keep in their bathrooms, which nobody actually reads. But even in this fallen world, there's a point at which ad proliferation becomes ridiculous. For Twitch streamers, Twitch's new ad experiment just crossed that line.

Yesterday [Sept. 15] afternoon, Twitch announced that it's "testing" new mid-stream ads that streamers have no direct control over.

"Beginning in September, as part of an ad experiment, some viewers may begin to notice that they are receiving ads during streams that others in a channel aren't receiving," the company wrote on its website. "Like pre-rolls, these are ads triggered by Twitch, not by the creator."

Crucially, these ads utilize Twitch's "picture-by-picture" functionality, which basically means that the stream you're watching pops out into a smaller window while the ad rolls in the main window. However, ads will still steal the show from some viewers, with streamers none the wiser as to who can hear what they're saying (picture-by-picture mutes streams) and, therefore, understand what's happening on stream while ads are playing.

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