Powder, an AI clipping tool for gaming, can detect when a creator yells during a stream | TechCrunch

by tyler | Nov 20, 2023 | Tech

Powder , AI-powered clipping software that takes highlights from gaming streams and turns them into short-form videos, will soon be able to detect shouting for gamers to create even better montages. The platform is also working on speech-to-text software so creators can get a transcript of their entire stream and search for keywords.

Powder has developed over 40 proprietary game-specific AI models, including audio analysis and laughter detection, as well as standalone models for popular titles like Fortnite, Valorant, Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Rocket League, Fall Guys, Elden Ring and Among Us. The company is also launching a model for Counter-Strike 2.

All the models work similarly; the AI scans the stream recordings – whether from Twitch, YouTube or an MP4 file — and finds spikes in activity, including victories, assists, kills and other performance-based in-game moments. Powder takes these highlights and creates short montages for creators to upload to social media.

Image Credits: Powder

Image Credits: Powder

Similar to its laughter recognition capability, the platform will soon launch another AI tool that recognizes fluctuations in voice so creators can generate clips of them shouting—a common reaction when playing intense ranked matches. The company anticipates a mid-December launch.

“From uncontrollable laughter and rage quits to even when there’s nothing obvious happening on-screen, the best moments when gaming is highly subjective and need to be reflected with several different perspectives that extend beyond the gameplay itself,” Powder co-founder and CEO Barthélémy Kiss told TechCrunch. “This made us certain that we needed to capture the emotion of playing games with your community. This combination of skill-based moments and deeply emotional moments is what makes gaming content creation so unique and special.”

Also coming to the platform next month is speech-to-text technology, giving creators a transcript of a stream and enabling them to quickly search specific words and pull up the best highlights. Streamers can also enter mood prompts. For instance, “Find me five funny clips where my fans go crazy.” The software is tailored with gamer lingo to help make results more accurate and precise.

“Being able to search and contextualize clips in long videos like Twitch streams with AI is the holy grail for content creators and the teams who support them, from their video editors to their agents and managers,” Kiss said.

Additionally, Powder is updating its “Community Hype” feature, which will roll out next week. The AI model launched in September and detects chat spikes. The update will recommend clips where the community “goes crazy,” Kiss said.

“The release of the second phase of Community Hype detection is to unlock another perspective weighing in on what makes a ‘highlight moment’ in a stream. One dimension of that is understanding what the community, who knows a streamer best, thinks. Communities have a great sense of what matters in a given gaming session or stream. In this latest release, when the community goes crazy and wants to remember a moment, that’s a moment that Powder AI will recommend you keep as a clip to share,” he explained.

According to Powder’s survey of over 3,200 streamers, creators spend an average of 53 hours a month or 630 hours a year looking for highlights and editing clips. Powder claims to save streamers upwards of around 10 hours per week or 520 hours a year.

The France-based startup was founded in 2018 by Kiss, Yannis Mangematin and Christian Navelot. It has raised $22 million to date.

Powder raises $14 million for its social app for game clips

Netflix’s cloud gaming service begins tests in US | TechCrunch

by tyler | Oct 17, 2023 | Tech

Netflix is beginning to test its cloud gaming service in the U.S . after initially launching limited trials in Canada and the U.K. The service, an expansion on the company’s mobile gaming efforts which began in 2021, has seen the streamer picking up gaming studios and licensing titles from individual developers with the intention to make gaming another major arm of its business. With its cloud gaming service, Netflix now allows members to play its games on smart TVs and TV-connected devices, like Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku and others, by using their mobile phone as the gaming controller.

The company first signaled its plans to enter the cloud gaming market last fall, when Netflix VP of Games Mike Verdu told the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt that it was exploring such an offering. Explaining where the service fits in the broader gaming market, Verdu explained Netflix saw gaming as “a value add.”

“We’re not asking you to subscribe as a console replacement,” he said. “It’s a completely different business model. The hope is over time that it just becomes this very natural way to play games wherever you are,” Verdu added.

The move pits Netflix against other cloud gaming services, including Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Nvidia GeForce Now, PlayStation Plus  and Amazon Luna. But in Netflix’s case, it’s making its games free with a Netflix subscription, with many of its titles tied to its most popular shows. The Wall Stree Journal reported the company is developing games based on shows like “Squid Game,” “Wednesday” and “Black Mirror,” among others. It has also reportedly discussed plans to release a “Grand Theft Auto” game from Take-Two Interactive through a licensing deal, the report noted.

Already Netflix has released games tied to popular series like “Love Is Blind,” “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Stranger Things,” “Narcos,” “Nailed It!” and others, in addition to rounding out its lineup with generally popular games, like puzzles, platformers, card games, strategy games, kids’ games and more.

The company has also been fairly acquisitive in ramping up its gaming business, snapping up studios like   Boss Fight Entertainment,   Night School Studio and Finland’s Next Games , in addition to establishing its own internal games studios, like the one in Helsinki led by a former Zynga GM and another in Southern California headed by a former Blizzard Entertainment exec , Chacko Sonny, the executive producer on “Overwatch.”

Though it began with a focus on mobile, Netflix has long hinted that mobile gaming was just the initial phase of its experiments. Cloud gaming and its own IP is the next.

Critics, however, question whether or not gaming makes sense for the streamer as its nearest competitors outside other media companies for users’ time spent are apps like TikTok and YouTube. In fact, YouTube just surpassed Netflix as a top video source for U.S. teens , according to investment bank Piper Sandler in a report by CNBC.

With the launch of its game streaming service on TVs, the company is looking to make its games available on more devices. The test includes “Oxenfree” from Night School Studio — the first games studio the streamer acquired back in 2021 — and Molehew’s Mining Adventure, a gem-mining arcade game.

Games can be played on Amazon Fire TV Streaming Media Players, Chromecast with Google TV, LG TVs, Nvidia Shield TV, Roku devices and TVs, Samsung Smart TVs, and Walmart ONN. The company said more devices would be supported in time.

To play the games on TVs, members use their mobile phone and a dedicated app. TechCrunch had spotted the launch of Netflix’s iPhone game controller app before the first official tests went live this August . Games will also be able to be played on Macs and PCs with a keyboard and mouse.

Netflix aims to test its game-streaming technology during the trials and work to improve the end user experience as the trials extend to the U.S.

Why Microsoft had to relinquish Activision’s cloud-gaming rights outside Europe | TechCrunch

by tyler | Oct 13, 2023 | Tech

Microsoft has finally done it — nearly two years after the Xbox-maker first revealed plans to acquire gaming giant Activision Blizzard in a mammoth $68.7 billion deal , it has managed to secure U.K. regulatory clearance , meaning that Activision will now be a fully fledged subsidiary.

But the antitrust clearance comes with one notable caveat.

For the next 15 years, Microsoft is relinquishing cloud-streaming rights for all Activision games outside the European Economic Area (EEA), a region that constitutes the 27 European Union (EU) members plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. This means that French game publisher Ubisoft is also a big winner, as it will have exclusive global streaming rights outside the EEA, while inside the EEA it will share streaming rights with rivals, including Microsoft/Activision.

There is no escaping the fact that Microsoft has had to give U.K. regulators a sizeable concession to rubberstamp its Activision acquisition, one that impacts current and future Activision titles that Microsoft wants to make available through the cloud, including the Call of Duty, Overwatch and World of Warcraft franchises.

The prologue to all this was written by the Competition and Markets Authority ( CMA ), a non-ministerial government department ( NMGD ) that oversees all-things antitrust in the U.K.

With the European Commission (EC) approving the Activision deal (albeit with conditions), and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) failing to block the deal , this meant that the CMA ultimately faced the wrath of one of the world’s biggest companies alone, on its hypothesis that the combined Microsoft and Activision company would “substantially weaken competition” and create “…the most powerful operator” in the cloud-gaming market.

While there are arguments to support or decry its position, the CMA’s remit applies purely to the U.K. market — so why is Microsoft giving up rights globally? The reality is, trying to oven-bake a U.K.-specific deal is impractical on a multitude of levels. If Microsoft wanted to gain approval from the CMA, it had to come back to the table with a restructured deal that didn’t make the U.K. appear like a second-class citizen.

“A U.K.-only remedy wouldn’t really be workable,” Tom Smith, a former CMA legal director who’s now partner at London-based law firm Geradin Partners, explained to TechCrunch. “U.K. consumers could miss out on developments that happen elsewhere — the CMA would be very sensitive about a perception that U.K. consumers are disadvantaged in the future.”

So Microsoft knew that any changes it made to its original deal had to apply globally to create a level playing field, so to speak. However, Microsoft had already reached a deal with the European Commission that would allow Activision games to be streamed via  any other provider for the next 10 years.

“The CMA’s starting point would have been a worldwide deal because it’s a worldwide market, and it’s not obvious how you can slice it up geographically,” Smith continued. “However, they couldn’t do that because of the European Commission’s remedy, which covers the EEA and it wouldn’t be appropriate to somehow overrule it, so they’ve ended up with everything apart from the EEA.”

Additionally, there were various reasons why geo-restricting a deal to the U.K. just would not have worked. If Microsoft was to offload the cloud-streaming rights to a third-party, it would need to be commercially appealing.

And this all feeds into the bigger picture, vis-à-vis why Microsoft’s deal isn’t limited to the U.K. market. Besides any technical obstacles around geo-restricting content, if Microsoft was going to find a company to acquire the streaming rights, it had to make the deal attractive to them — and “rest of the world” is a lot more appealing than “U.K.”

“Part of the reason the CMA wanted to do this was so that Microsoft didn’t have a monopolistic position,” Chris Early , Ubisoft’s senior VP of strategic partnerships and business development, told TechCrunch. “If you only took those rights away in the U.K., and Microsoft still had those rights everywhere else in the world, then it might be able to have a monopolistic position for the rest of the world, enough so that it would affect the U.K. And they also had to think about whatever they do for the partner [which turned out to be Ubisoft] has to be commercially interesting enough.”

So for Ubisoft, this deal means it has full and exclusive cloud-streaming rights to all current commercially available Activision games, as well as those released in the next 15 years. But more than that, it has this license in perpetuity , meaning it will never expire so long a Microsoft / Activision continue to make those games commercially available. Once the 15-year period is up, all subsequent games released by Activision won’t fall under the existing licensing agreement.

In theory, this could mean that Microsoft gradually pulls the plugs on all the games it has previously launched to circumvent the agreement it has with Ubisoft, once the 15 years is up. But Ubisoft reckons that if it does a good job, then this agreement shouldn’t be seen as a hindrance for Microsoft.

Indeed, Ubisoft’s rights extend beyond its own Ubisoft+ subscription service , allowing it to relicense access to the Activision Blizzard catalog to any other company, which it is incentivized to do.

“The only way we’re going to be commercially successful is if we’re pleasing players,” Early said. “If we’re pleasing players, then maybe it won’t be bad for Microsoft. My impression is they’re just going to continue their normal development roadmap, because if we do our job well in distribution, then lots of people are gonna have access to these games in other ways, and it’s not going to impact them.”

Cloud gaming firm Shadow says hackers stole customers’ personal data | TechCrunch

by tyler | Oct 12, 2023 | Tech

French technology company Shadow has confirmed a data breach involving customers’ personal information.

The Paris-headquartered startup, which offers gaming through its cloud-based PC service , said in an email to customers this week that hackers had accessed their personal information after a successful social engineering attack targeted the company.

“At the end of September, we were the victim of a social engineering attack targeting one of our employees,” Shadow CEO Eric Sèle said in the email, seen by TechCrunch. “This highly sophisticated attack began on the Discord platform with the downloading of malware under cover of a game on the Steam platform, proposed by an acquaintance of our employee, himself a victim of the same attack.”

Shadow said that though its security team took unspecified “immediate action,” the hackers were able to connect to the management interface of one of the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to obtain customers’ private data.

That data includes full names, email addresses, dates of birth, billing addresses and credit card expiry dates. Shadow says no passwords or sensitive banking data were compromised.

An individual who posted on a popular hacking forum on Wednesday claiming responsibility for the Shadow breach said they are selling the stolen database, which allegedly contains the personal data of more than 530,000 Shadow customers. The individual said they were selling the alleged data after they claimed they were ignored by the company.

Shadow spokesperson Thomas Beaufils confirmed the authenticity of the email that the company sent to customers but declined to comment further or answer TechCrunch’s questions. Shadow declined to name the software-as-a-service provider when asked by TechCrunch or say if it knows how many Shadow customers are affected, but the spokesperson did not dispute the hacker’s claims when asked.

Shadow’s email to customers, which has not yet been shared on any of the company’s website or social media channels at the time of writing, says that the company has “reinforced the security protocols” it uses with its providers and has upgraded internal systems to “render compromised workstations harmless.”

The company is advising customers to be wary of suspicious-looking emails and to set up multi-factor authentication on their accounts.