Twitch streamer and game developer Jason Thor Hall, aka Pirate Software, explained why he’ll likely never broadcast on Kick and the issues that led him to make this decision.
Pirate Software is one of many content creators who multi-stream on several platforms at once, catering to audiences across sites like Twitch and YouTube.
However, he says he’ll likely never multi-stream on Kick, for reasons he discussed in an October 2024 broadcast.
“No, I’m not gonna stream on Kick,” he admitted. “I don’t think I’m ever gonna stream on Kick, at all. There’s no reason for me to do that, to be honest with you.”
To start, Hall explained that he found a problem with Kick’s ‘Other, Watch Party’ category, which was previously named ‘Other, TV Shows & Movies,’ and still shows up with this title on search engines and in the category’s URL.
“As a platform, if someone is streaming copyrighted content on your platform, you get a DMCA claim and you take it down,” he said. “…but if you make a category called ‘Other, TV Shows & Movies,’ you’re incentivizing the behavior on your platform.”
Hall claimed that he’d expressed this sentiment toward one of the platform’s co-founders and top streamers, Trainwreck — who, according to Hall, didn’t take the criticism well.
“He called me a dumbass for about 30 minutes straight on his stream and said that Twitch also has copyrighted content, which it does, but they don’t have a category for it,” he continued. “They just have individuals streaming it, and then they get taken down.
“…He deletes the VOD, and they change the category to ‘Other, Watch Party,’ but they leave the category name as ‘Other, TV Shows, Movies.’ It’s still the same. It’s been a year, and this category is just filled with people streaming anime and TV shows illegally.”
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On top of this, Hall pointed out that Kick supposedly rents out Amazon’s interactive video service to host this copyrighted content, claiming the company is “using Amazon as a live stream Pirate Bay.”
As Hall mentioned, Twitch also has an issue with broadcasters who stream copyrighted content. In fact, the site underwent a controversial ‘TV Meta’ back in 2022, when numerous streamers watched shows like Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and Nickelodeon’s Avatar to thousands of viewers.
This ‘meta’ sparked a heated debate online as broadcasters argued the ethics of streaming content that didn’t belong to them. However, even big streamers didn’t go without punishment, as both Pokimane and Disguised Toast copped DMCA-related bans due to watching these shows with their audiences.
Dexerto reached out to Kick for comment, who have now changed the category’s URL after it was brought to their attention.
The company also referred us to their DMCA policy and Terms of Service, which details’ users’ rights to their own content as well as general intellectual property rights on the site.
As lined out in Kick’s TOS, the platform “takes no responsibility and assumes no liability for any User Content that you or any other User or third-party posts, sends, or otherwise makes available over the Service.”
Additionally, Kick says that streamers are “be “solely responsible for your User Content and the consequences of posting, publishing it, sharing it, or otherwise making it available on the Service, and you agree that we are only acting as a passive conduit for your online distribution and publication of your User Content.”