PREVIEW FEATURE - March, 2021

Building the Future of Live, Interactive Entertainment

FastForward talks with Head of Music Engineering, Randeep Bhatia

WRITERS: BT Salle-Widelock and Semira Robinson  REPORTERS: Jacob Taichman-Bernstein, Zadie Winthrop, Eliza Gould and Taylor Elliot  (FROM:Phillips Academy Andover, San Rafael High, Redwood High, Sir Francis Drake High, Tamalpais High, The Urban School of San Francisco schools)

As a young boy, Bhatia would crawl out of his bed at four in the morning, shirking comforters and leaping towards his favorite video games. Now, as the Head of Music Engineering at Twitch, Randeep Bhatia and his team of engineers are building products and techniques to navigate music technology for their community of users and creators.

While Twitch is mainly a service for streaming video games, creators across the website also cook, draw, and sing on their channels.

Last spring, heading into an ongoing lockdown, people turned to the Internet for everything from family reunions to live concerts. During this period of turmoil and shelter in place, Twitch experienced a spike in popularity. Self-described as a place “where millions of people come together live every day to chat, interact, and make their own entertainment together,” the hours watched on Twitch comparing Q4 2019 to Q4 2020 are up almost 103% year over year.

Bhatia spoke to us about the growth of Twitch beyond its original intent, as only a service for streaming video games. “Twitch was just gamers, and musicians became part of it, people who cook became part of it... so, it’s a journey. Our goal is to incorporate interactivity and creativity.” On Twitch, the largest service of its kind, successful streamers can have anywhere from five thousand to fifty thousand average viewers. For many streamers, this is a job. The website strives to be a place of welcoming, and the massive variety of content on it is reflective of that. “One of the things that we focus on is making Twitch a safe and inclusive place to express yourself,” said Bhatia. He’s also happy with how the website is bringing people together in a tough time. “Twitch has given such a huge platform to creators and artists to come in and express their creativity in a safe manner.”

Graphics filled up his young years, speeding across his screen. And, as the passions of teenagers tend to do, video games became a lifelong endeavor for Bhatia. He has worked on the Sims and FIFA Madden, two big names in the video game industry. Now, three years into his new job at Twitch, he is already an accomplished member of the company.

All companies face challenges, but from this come opportunities for change. Twitch faced criticism when they saw an uptick in DMCA (or Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998) requests from the music industry, which resulted in Twitch taking down VODs that included copyrighted music. The company requested streamers to stop using any copyrighted music in streams, threatening suspensions or bans. Many creators were unhappy with the uptick in takedown notifications and spoke out about creative freedom and the spirit of the website being changed. But months ahead of this, Bhatia and his team had begun working on a solution to this problem. They were building a new product called Soundtrack by Twitch. Soundtrack is a library full of music from independent artists, fully rights-cleared music. The engineering of this new product became one massive project. The goal was for the music to play separately from the stream, to avoid any risk of accidental muting or takedowns by detection programs. If it worked, records of said stream would show only the streamer, sans audio. In order to make this work, they had to rework some of Twitch’s service to accommodate multitrack audio without disturbing current Twitch users. Naturally, Bhatia’s team took to the jamboard. Ideas splashed into their meeting rooms and slowly came to life.

Bhatia talked about seamlessly integrating the new feature into the website. “We modified the entire ingestion backend of Twitch to take audio video, as well as the metadata audio of Soundtrack. Now we can make that music only part of live streaming. And it doesn’t end up in any recorded media.” Now anyone, no matter your gaming setup or computer model, can access Twitch’s signature product Soundtrack.

Bhatia’s team has also been working closely with the Soundtrack team to credit any artists whose music is used during streams. As Bhatia explained, the artist’s music and album would pop up on any stream featuring their music. Then, any viewer would be able to add that to their Spotify or Apple Music libraries with just the click of a button. Interactive ease such as this is widespread in modern technology, which is part of the reason why the Twitch logo has become synonymous with the video game industry.

For many young gamers, Twitch is not only a service to experience the skill of their accomplished counterparts but a treasure trove of different live streams. It allows collaboration with friends and mentors. With a wide variety of age ranges on Twitch, engineers and staff remain vigilant, from vetting new hires to closely monitoring activities on the service. As a result, Twitch’s influence has remained positive during the pandemic. It has served as a bridge between friends unable to interact due to COVID-19 restrictions and an avenue for recent political reckoning. The House of Representatives’ own Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, took to Twitch to get out the vote while playing “Among Us,” a viral video game. Not only did Cortez have upward of four hundred thousand viewers, but she raised two hundred thousand dollars. As soon as you open up Twitch’s purple and white site, you may find streams featuring video games (arguably what they are most known for), painters, chefs, and much more.

Its versatile nature with its hard-working engineers have become a brand for Twitch. With the help of Randeep Bhatia and his team of engineers Twitch has not only become more inclusive but deft in the latest music technology. Even when vaccines have been distributed and we’re free to gather together in person, Twitch is in no way going away. Its boom, along with the rest of the video game industry and social media in general, is a sign of what’s to come. Making entertainment together, being creative and interactive is something that can connect us more.