No Warning, Just A ‘Set to Private’ Wasteland
One of the oldest and biggest gaming channels on YouTube, Machinima, has vanished overnight. With no warning whatsoever, the entire network of gaming content has been eliminated from YouTube forever. Every video on the site is now set to Private as a result of the parent company changing hands.
This means that shows like Two Best Friends Play, Arby ‘n’ the Chief, Teenage Pokemon, and Inside Gaming are gone for good. Lawrence Sonntag, a former member of the Inside Gaming team, shed some light on the subject. According to Sonntag, the move came as an alternative to solving a slew of copyright entanglements.
“Warner, at this point, cannot verify the copyrights to all videos in Machinima’s network — and there are a ton of videos.” Sonntag added that this sort of hard decision is just in the nature of the business. Viewers hardly ever see the more cutthroat side of things, at least until it’s too late to do anything about it. Moves like this make you wonder what other company-controlled content is vulnerable to these kind of sweeping changes. How much of YouTube is under the shadow of the axe, awaiting some word from a board of directors?