Replay VOD Playlist and 24/7 Channels in beta.
Twitch.tv has announced on there blog a new feature coming soon that will enable broadcasters the option of setting up playlists of videos which will be running during the casters offline time.
Sounds like a great idea but there is a very big exploit which I will be betting on that many broadcasters will be engaged in which revolves around loyalty systems.
A year or two ago many loyalty bot abusers engaged in a tactic of rewarding people points for having there browser open (with adblock off) on there channel while offline. This was mostly occurring in the Diablo 3 community from what I've seen but probably others copy this in other communities.
Why would the broadcaster want people to do this sort of a thing? Simple, what these partner casters were doing was running long advertisement blocks every x number of minutes over and over until they restarted to stream. This generated alot of advertisement revenue while the channel was offline. The carrot for the viewers was chances for gift cards or game codes by using the loyalty points they accumulated while staying on the channel. These casters took in the extra revenue, use a tiny portion of that and gave it back to the viewership as rewards.
A example would be like making 100 dollars a day in advertisement money, and doing a loyalty point give away for a 10 dollar gift card the next day. Furthermore alot of the loyalty users keep the page running minimized or in another tab muted. So whenever these broadcasters start up their streams, they get instance viewership boosts from all of the loyalty viewers.
Did twitch do anything to combat against this sort of a practise? Yup, they did in a hidden fashion, they made it so no advertisements can be triggered anymore while a stream is offline.
With this new upcoming VOD playlist which can make channels run all day long, this sort of a practice will return.
