In today's "Ask Me Anything" on reddit, Shear addresses recent concerns.

Q13: How would you justify the muting of "in-game and ambient music"?

E. Shear: Muting original in-game music is a mistake. We're working on it if something slipped through the gaps. Ambient music (playing Britney Spears in the background) is not allowed on Twitch unless you've licensed it for that purpose. {...} It affects licensed in-game music but not original in-game music. Sorry we weren't clearer.

Q14: How will Audible Magic know that {a broadcaster} has permission?

E. Shear: If someone gets permission, we'll be implementing that on an ongoing basis on our side. It won't require going through the steps over and over.

Q15: Wouldn't disabling adverts on VODs that have copyrighted music have the same effect as muting them? The person is no longer making revenue from VODs with copyrighted music.

E. Shear: Unfortunately, no. That would be great but it's not an option.

Q16: Why not allow content creators to accept the claim on individual VODs via their dashboard?

E. Shear: We're working on providing the ability to "accept the claim" and share monetization, but that might take a long time.

Q17: Do you think Twitch needs to support multiple audio streams?

E. Shear: Supporting multiple audio streams would be an awesome feature and it's something we hope to build eventually.

Q18: Most speedrunners’ speedruns are more than 2 hours.

E. Shear: This was an edge case we missed -- before the policy goes into effect we will have a fix.

Q19: HTML5? Ever? It’s 2014, Flash is pretty much dead. Updates? Anything?

E. Shear: Unfortunately, HTML5 doesn't work for technical reasons right now. We would like to move to it eventually. (More specifically, it doesn't work with h.264 HLS live streaming across several browsers.)

Q20: Could you guys PLEASE allow broadcasters to select their own stream delay?

E. Shear: We're working on turning down the default stream delay, and hopefully it will be much lower soon.

Q21: Why is the stream delay necessary to keep it profitable?

E. Shear: Stream delay isn't for profit, it's for HLS video. {HTTP Live Streaming} It's hard to stream HLS video with very low delay for technical reasons. HLS video is necessary to improve QoS {Quality of Service}, and you can see it pretty clearly in terms of improved QoS since we launched the change.

Q22: Any plans to add access to archived videos on Xbox's Twitch app?

E. Shear: Yes, and in fact these VOD changes are explicitly a required step to support that ability (bringing VOD to other platforms).

Q23: Will you guys be supporting Chromecast anytime in the near future?

E. Shear: It's on the docket -- we would like to support Chromecast.

Colt "ShdwFlm" Casey
Deputy Editor