Twitch has finally released a feature update for the DMCA issue, but it’s not as helpful as you might think. Now, it’s not all terrible, but the offered solution is “You can now delete all of your VODs at once” is laughable, to say the least. DMCA has been a plague on Twitter, with some IRL streamers having to delete VODs because Kanye West’s music was playing in a store they weren’t even in. Further down the line, (April-June 2021), there’s talk of Multi-track Audio support in Twitch Studio proper. That way, you can control which audio sources are in your livestream, and which can go to your VODs/Clips. That way, you can play the music in the background, but when the VOD hits, it’s nowhere to be found.

In the Twitch DMCA Update, you can still get copyright strikes, be assured of that. However, you’ll now see the notifications in your “My Channel” inbox, so you will always know how close your channel is to destruction. That’s nice to know. But at least you don’t have to worry about missing emails and suddenly losing your channel.

Twitch also points out that back in December, they added a feature that lets you unpublish individual VODs. You can look them over without making them visible, to scan them for safe content. While this is a nice feature, it also feels like a stressful new part of streaming. “Making sure your content won’t get a strike every night.”

It would also be nice to see a Dispute feature to be added, so you can dispute a claim. That way, if it’s something innocuous, or something you have no control over, you can avoid a copyright strike and thus, not get punished for sounds that are outside of your purview. Apparently, Twitch has also made it easier for people to see the DMCA-stricken videos in the Twitch Video Producer.

Now, it’s not all hate from the community. This is an improvement to how the process worked in the past. If you have several VODs (or even all of them), you can now delete VODs in a batch, or all at once. This is an improvement instead of having to go through them one by one. In addition, the ability to watch a VOD in the client, and not having to download it? Much better.  The problem is that in a year, our solution to the DMCA crisis on Twitch is an update that lets us nuke our VODs in huge groups.

YouTube already has a better solution to these problems. Two days ago, YouTube Help offered some new documentation to help streamers. There is a new “Checks” step when you go to upload a video on Desktop. It will automatically screen the uploads for possible copyright claims, and ad suitability restrictions. This check takes about three minutes for copyrights and another few for monetization checks. On top of that, as long as you are not outright stealing footage from someone, if a copyright issue comes up, you just forfeit the money from the video. You don’t have to stress about losing your channel over something like that.

It’s good that Twitch is putting in some work, but there just has to be a better way than how the website is approaching DMCA woes, other than this update. The ability to filter certain audio tracks down so they won’t be in VODs would be a godsend. Hopefully, that doesn’t lead to DMCA claims during a stream instead of after the fact.