Back in February Iris Ophelia published an article over at New World Notes regarding live streaming Second Life : Quick Tips: SL Content Creators, Here’s How to Start Livestreaming Your Work.
In that blog post Iris provided a tip for the choice of hosting service to stream your work on :
Twitch.tv remains the most popular choice among Second Life streamers because it’s free and has a lot of momentum in the tech and gaming communities, but it’s not without its drawbacks.
However it seems all isn’t well in the world of live streaming Second Life via Twitch. In the comments of Iris’ article Jessica Pixel wrote :
Be careful streaming ‘non-games’ on Twitch. I actually had my account banned for 24 hours today while I was streaming myself scripting things in Second Life. Granted, I think that happens when someone reports you and my screen probably didn’t look like I was ‘playing’, even though I know there wasn’t anything questionable on my screen.
Jessica appealed her ban and was then told by a moderator of Twitch :
Your account was suspended for streaming Second Life, which is not permitted for streaming on our services. Do not do this again.
This raised quite a few questions, the first one being why is there a Second Life category on Twitch if it’s banned? Another being, if Second Life is banned, why won’t Twitch point this out?
Yesterday Iris Ophelia published a follow up article : Twitch Reportedly Suspending Users for Streaming Second Life – Competitor Hitbox “Happy” to Allow SL Streaming. Iris reported that there is talk of Second Life being banned from Twitch going back to January 2014.
However Twitch have so far not responded to requests regarding whether Second Life is banned or not, Iris wrote :
I contacted Twitch directly to clarify their policy on Second Life, but they have yet to respond.
Speculation as to why Twitch may have banned Second Life has appeared, with several theories doing the rounds. One theory is related to the fact that there is adult content in Second Life. Another theory is that some of those who have previously live streamed Second Life via Twitch were streaming trolling videos and a further theory is that Second Life is not a game.
However whereas Second Life is not a game, as I’ve recently pointed out, there are games within Second Life and scripting, building and such like can very much be part of that development process.
The radio silence from Twitch isn’t helping right now. However whilst one service remain silent, another were all too happy to respond to Iris. Hitbox responded to Iris’ request regarding whether live streaming of Second Life is allowed on their service :
We are more than happy to allow broadcasters to stream Second Life on hitbox granted they are responsible about the content being presented to the viewers. We don’t tolerate our broadcasters to present mature, sexual content that isn’t the intention of the game.
We know that Second Life offers the player the opportunity to live out a second life literally, but discourage certain aspects being broadcasted that aren’t age-appropriate. We can’t regulate the age of our viewers, and it is their responsibility to watch what they are comfortable with, but there’s some subject matter that isn’t appropriate for our broadcasting platform.
Long story short: we are okay with broadcasters streaming Second Life as long as it’s done responsibly.
The response from Hitbox is very sensible. I can understand companies getting the heebie jeebies about adult content being broadcast, but there’s so much more to Second Life than adult content.
Hopefully Twitch will respond one way or another soon.
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