EPT Recently, as we’re preparing to get into the swing of a bunch of great tournaments, there has been a lot of discussion happening around who is allowed to broadcast professional Dota 2 matches. While there is a tendency to oversimplify issues like these, often times it takes a fair amount of effort to work through what the right outcome is for the community as a whole.
With any change to any of our products we tend to start with a framing question of “What is best for our customers”. This means all customers, not just the ones who care about professional play, but also those who ardently follow specific streamers, along with tournament operators and their sponsors. Generally we tend to try to tread pretty lightly around areas where the community outside of Valve is doing a lot of the work, primarily because we don’t want to stifle invention that leads to someone doing something really cool that we hadn’t thought of. The community has built many beneficial things for itself — websites like Dotabuff, contributions to the Steam workshop, independent broadcast studios, sites like DatDota, streamers with unique communities of fans – and because of that we think that the community should have broad license in terms of what is allowed.
Hopefully that background is useful when considering the specific issue of who should be broadcasting Dota 2 matches.
Broadly speaking, we see two groups of fans (with some degree of overlap). Some fans follow competitive play – they have favorite teams, players, casters, tournaments — and want to consume content directly from tournament organizers who are producing events. Other fans have strong affinities to specific personalities, and they watch them play games, talk about games, and cast a variety of professional, amateur, and pub games. We want to make sure that there is content available that serves both groups of customers.
To that end, in addition to the official, fully-produced streams from the tournament organizer itself, we believe that anyone should be able to broadcast a match from DotaTV for their audience. However, we don’t think they should do so in a commercial manner or in a way that directly competes with the tournament organizer’s stream. This means no advertising/branding overlays, and no sponsorships. It also means not using any of the official broadcast’s content such as caster audio, camerawork, overlays, interstitial content, and so on. Finally, this is not permission for studios to broadcast each other’s events. In general, everyone should play nice together, and we think the boundaries should be pretty clear.
With any change to any of our products we tend to start with a framing question of “What is best for our customers”. This means all customers, not just the ones who care about professional play, but also those who ardently follow specific streamers, along with tournament operators and their sponsors. Generally we tend to try to tread pretty lightly around areas where the community outside of Valve is doing a lot of the work, primarily because we don’t want to stifle invention that leads to someone doing something really cool that we hadn’t thought of. The community has built many beneficial things for itself — websites like Dotabuff, contributions to the Steam workshop, independent broadcast studios, sites like DatDota, streamers with unique communities of fans – and because of that we think that the community should have broad license in terms of what is allowed.
Hopefully that background is useful when considering the specific issue of who should be broadcasting Dota 2 matches.
Broadly speaking, we see two groups of fans (with some degree of overlap). Some fans follow competitive play – they have favorite teams, players, casters, tournaments — and want to consume content directly from tournament organizers who are producing events. Other fans have strong affinities to specific personalities, and they watch them play games, talk about games, and cast a variety of professional, amateur, and pub games. We want to make sure that there is content available that serves both groups of customers.
To that end, in addition to the official, fully-produced streams from the tournament organizer itself, we believe that anyone should be able to broadcast a match from DotaTV for their audience. However, we don’t think they should do so in a commercial manner or in a way that directly competes with the tournament organizer’s stream. This means no advertising/branding overlays, and no sponsorships. It also means not using any of the official broadcast’s content such as caster audio, camerawork, overlays, interstitial content, and so on. Finally, this is not permission for studios to broadcast each other’s events. In general, everyone should play nice together, and we think the boundaries should be pretty clear.
You can view the statement from Valve here: http://blog.dota2.com/2017/10/broadcasting-dota-2/
The statement from Valve makes it clear that they support anyone who wishes to stream tournament games from DotaTV but find issue with anyone making money from advertisement / overlay's / sponsorship's while doing it. However Valve also seems to leave it up to the individual tournament organizers and streamers themselves to sort out exactly when it is acceptable and when it crosses the line.
There's a few reddit threads, the main one is probably :
https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/75y69e/can_we_get_an_official_valve_response_on_casting/
Victims :
BSJ
shokzTV
froggedTV
No one really seems sure what is going on and trying to coordinate information on reddit is a giant mess. Just gathering all the pertinent information into an easily readable post here.
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Original Post from FroggedTV :
Hello, I am currently working with FroggedTV : www.twitch.tv/froggedTV. The main and only casting channel for French content.
We are currently got banned from watching the Starladder in the In-game client. We got a DMCA Ban, that's means Starladder decided to ban us.
That point makes us wonder for the future of the French broadcast of Events in DotA2 ?
There is 3 options :
*1 - Broadcasting on Tournament_channel_FR against payoff/revenues, if you cast 14hours for someone else you need to get reward. (not only Twitch CPM revenues, because in France we have close to zero ads revenues)
*2 - Pay the broadcast right, however if you compare the price that might be asked against french revenues that is almost impossible to buy it.
*3 - Using the old system by using Dota2TV In-Game system, and promote the tournament & sponsor to the French Audience on our channel.
We always thought DotaTV was free to use and to cast. I remember seeing those news from Valve stating it and this is the first time we got a DMCA Ban over using DotaTV. We are in a complete grey area and we really need Valve to get out of it. This is our passion and if we can't cast any future tournament we would really like to know it now !
If Anyone from Valve or the community can help us to answer to it that will help us a lot because that might be the end of French broadcast in competitive Dota2 with the Minor/major system. The French community is growing but we are not bigger enough to be considered as main language. For Everyone who are wondering what we have done since 2012.
Some productions we did for last months/year :
TI7FR : TI7FR Insider :
We build a studio in a house with 20 people for the complete TI7 duration and be able to reach 2000 to 5000 viewers on twitch. (That is a lot for French DotA2)
www.reddit.com
Valve video policy :
http://store.steampowered.com/video_policy
There was a moonduck podcast recently where Sunsfan and a few others were convinced it had changed, other personalities disagreed and moonduck has changed their stance :
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Trentpax
Before that podcast I checked with several people who were convinced that there was now a precedence to stop people from streaming DotaTV tournaments.
Since that podcast I have been enlightened by other people who have said that is not the case and the Valve policy clearly states that you can stream DotaTV tournaments still.
So basically I tried to do my research before that podcast like I do any topic and ended up looking like an idiot. Classic.
I would really appreciate some serious clarity from Valve on the subject because with the conflicting understanding from various people within the industry it's not helping anyone.
So yea AFAIK people can still stream from DotaTV under valve policy.
TL;DR: ignore everything from the moonduck podcast. Please give clarity Valve.www.reddit.com
Before that podcast I checked with several people who were convinced that there was now a precedence to stop people from streaming DotaTV tournaments.
Since that podcast I have been enlightened by other people who have said that is not the case and the Valve policy clearly states that you can stream DotaTV tournaments still.
So basically I tried to do my research before that podcast like I do any topic and ended up looking like an idiot. Classic.
I would really appreciate some serious clarity from Valve on the subject because with the conflicting understanding from various people within the industry it's not helping anyone.
So yea AFAIK people can still stream from DotaTV under valve policy.
TL;DR: ignore everything from the moonduck podcast. Please give clarity Valve.www.reddit.com
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Sajadene disagreeing, though it was a few days ago.
One theory being bandied about is that twitch is banning streams that are casting SL, even though it does not violate Valve ToS, because it takes away viewers from the official tournament(and the tournament is sponsored by twitch? I'm not entirely sure on that point). That's just a theory people have been posting and not confirmed in any way currently.
