Twitch Launches Short-Form Video Feed; OpenAI and Microsoft Sued by Eight US Newspapers; WeTransfer to Allow Direct Sales

by Aimee Newell Tarín on 2nd May 2024 in News

On today’s news digest: Twitch Launches Short-Form Video Feed; OpenAI and Microsoft Sued by Eight US Newspapers; WeTransfer to Allow Direct Sales

Another tech giant has entered the short-form video playing field: Amazon’s livestreaming site Twitch has launched its own short-form video Discovery Feed, which will appear as a new tab on the mobile app. The Discovery Feed will allow users to scroll through short clips taken from longer videos on the app. Creators on the platform typically livestream themselves for up to several hours playing video games or chatting with audiences – users can pick out entertaining segments of creators’ livestreams and turn these into separate clips. The Twitch app currently has 170 million monthly US users. As it stands, steamers won’t receive a cut of the ad revenue from ads that appear in the Discovery Feed as they don’t appear directly in users’ videos.

OpenAI and Microsoft are being sued for copyright infringement again: the case has been brought forward by eight major US newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital. These include the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune, among others. Their case is being represented by one of the law firms supporting the New York Times’ complaint against the accused companies. Until now, The New York Times had been the only major newspaper to take legal action against both companies over copyright infringement. The new lawsuit has been filed in the same district as the former – this means that if the same judge is chosen to oversee both cases, the complaints could be combined. This closely follows the news of OpenAI’s content licensing partnership with the UK’s Financial Times.

Meanwhile, WeTransfer is adding new features which allow users to sell files directly on the platform. With this updated functionality, creators will be able to earn money immediately without following up on invoices for payments, or dealing with the additional costs of a website or storefront in order to make sales. The integrated payments are being rolled out to all users globally. Beyond the standard processing fees from Stripe (the service which powers the site’s integrated payments), there will be no additional costs.