Over the past few months, YouTube has been pretty aggressive about cracking down on YouTube channels that upload any sort of video game content. It recently came to light that a series of changes to how YouTube performs these “content ID matches” would come about in January, resulting in hundreds of thousands of videos being flagged due to them containing “unauthorized” content. Many indie developers have been speaking out against this crusade on game videos since people playing their games and making videos of it has lead to many success stories.
In fact, some large publishers like Paradox Interactive and Capcom have taken to Twitter to let users know it’s okay to use footage from their games in videos. While the issue rages on, Nintendo has been guilty of using the content ID match system built into YouTube to stifle channel owners who show Nintendo games in the past.
It looks like Nintendo may be working with some channels in the future in order to get them whitelisted, however. According to this post on Google+, a Nintendo representative named Dan (not Dan Adelman) got back with a channel owner on his inquiries into his content ID matched videos. The results were kind of surprising:
The same Dan responded to that email today, he acted rather shocked on how lucrative YouTube actually is.
Because of that, he asked us how he could help us.The only thing we asked was to put our channel (guess its name…) on their whitelist, and resolve all the claims that were already made against us.
After that, he sent us another email asking how to whitelist a YouTube channel.
We called up BroadbandTV, which is our network, they confirmed us the users of YouTube’s CMS system can whitelist channels from claims.
When we asked how to do that, they told us to email TGN support, and we are awaiting response as we speak.
It’s nice to see that Nintendo is keen to work with its fans in order to help avoid these content ID matches that are currently nuking video game content all around the site. When Nintendo first started claiming videos for ad revenue we thought they would be at the forefront of this new system YouTube is putting in place, but it seems that may not be the case.
If you have a YouTube channel with Nintendo videos–or videos from any other publisher–it might be worth your time to contact them via Twitter, forums, or email to see if they’ll grant you the specific permission that is needed to help avoid these content ID matches on your content.
