The news yesterday that Twitch was testing mid-stream ads was bad, but man, actually seeing them in action is somehow even worse.
While yesterday we only had mock-ups to get upset about, the ads are now rolling out to certain streamers and on certain streams, so we can actually see how terrible they are.
Our example today comes from SmilinDominator, who was restreaming the big PS5 event earlier today (basically, he was streaming over the top of Sony’s official stream). Halfway through the Hogwarts Legacy trailer, with no warning and no consideration given to what else might have been happening on-screen, he was served a midroll ad.
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(You can see this in its fuller context on the original stream, at the 45:30 mark).
Before we go any further, this was a weird one. The ad actually appeared in the PS5 stream SmilinDominator was broadcasting over the top of, not his own stream, and because the feature is still in testing, he must have been one of the few to get/see the ad.
In most cases, whatever was streaming live would be reduced to a smaller picture-in-picture window, but in this case because it’s a restream everyone watching simply missed out on 30 seconds of the stream.
But the end result is still the same. It fuckin sucks!