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by bookwormAT 4018 days ago
I don't understand why Google can not roll this out internationally from the start. Why only US and UK?

The content is not subject to old copyright contracts, which is typically the argument not to launch something in Europe and its crazy copyright situation. And twitch is available everywhere.

If Google wants this to become a success, shouldn't they roll this out to as many people as possible and hope for network effects?

6 comments

I don't understand either. It seem like Google thinks people only speak the language from where they connect.

Ex: Youtube keeps suggesting me German videos even if all my accept-language headers and settings are set to en-US.(I'm in Switzerland, speak French). Also, you only see populars videos from your country. Wich makes no sense when the total population is less than Paris.

Seems like Google started segregating content by location and country language, it's sad and arbitrary.

Fair-use is not a universal thing. The US has it but Germany for example doesn't. In these countries things like Let's Plays are copyright violations.
Maybe because their algorithms to organize the videos by game and type have only been optimized for English US and UK submissions.
Unlikely. Many european gamers from various countries game exclusively in english, since that is the original language for almost all games. Heck, the most famous game streamer is a Swede and all of his content is in (horribly squeaky) english.
Only AAA titles are translated into anything but English, and even those are just translated into a handful of languages.

I know people from all over Europe, they all expect gaming content to be English.

I'm Norwegian, but I run all my software in English. Linux distributions are the only ones having trouble with my 'strage' locale and language setup, but that's fully due to incompetent devs.

this would explain why there are only submissions in english. But not why those submissions are blocked in other countries.
> Why only US and UK?

At the very least: translation?

Pretty much none of the games streamed on Twitch are translated into anything else than perhaps German and French and that somehow doesn't make them block the whole world from seeing the streams.
I really doubt the target demographic for this needs translations...
How is the copyright situation in Europe crazier than in the US? (genuine question)
Many countries with their own individual licenses
Perhaps they want to test it first before rolling it out worldwide?