Sometimes we take things for granted until it is taken away from us. Well, I’m realizing how much I took YouTube streaming for granted. We could simply create a stream on the website, select the stream we created in SlingStudio, and press the “start streaming” button. It just worked.
Now, we’ve fallen into some strange grey area and I can’t tell if we are being punished or experiencing a bug. Our live streaming ability is disabled. To be clear, this started as a mistake on my part. But, I feel like taking our streaming away indefinitely for this is pretty harsh, considering it was on a stream no one saw.
What Happened
We are trying to put together a new streaming setup. I have some new PTZ cameras, and I am hooking them up to an OBS computer. The challenge has been sound. The delay between the camera feeds and the audio has been tough to sync up. To troubleshoot, I started an Unlisted live stream and pulled that stream up on my phone. I pointed the camera at my face and spoke into a microphone. I adjusted the audio delay and repeated the test until the sound was in sync.
The problem was that once I was happy with the result, I thought I clicked the end stream button. Either I didn’t click the confirm or since I didn’t stop it in OBS it may have restarted. I went off to eat dinner thinking it was all done and didn’t worry about the kids playing in the auditorium. I was hungry and annoyed with the sound setup. When I got back, there was a message saying the stream was stopped due to violations. Apparently, the cameras had caught the kids unattended, and kids are not allowed to be unattended on a live stream.
Lesson Learned
This was definitely my mistake. I will give more effort to making sure the streams are stopped at the end of the service or whatever we are recording. And, I will make sure that it is stopped in both places, on YouTube and in OBS. In addition, I’d like to come up with some automation or maybe just a checklist that will help us double check.
Google’s Communication Issues
Here where I feel like it is unfair. And, I think this is a Google bug.
Unfortunately, I can’t take screenshots because I can no longer get to the review pages. I was pretty sure that the review and take action page said that we could acknowledge the issue and there would be no penalty. I wish I could get back to that page or had taken screenshots. The user interface seemed to only take into account that you want to dispute the findings of the video. Once I clicked acknowledge, there was no way to proceed.
This is the email we received:
The email does say Channels not in compliance “may” lose their ability. The How this impacts you only says it removed the content.
The email also says that I can ask them to take another look if they got it wrong. The problem is that I can only ask them about the video not meeting the guidelines. There’s no way to ask them to review their penalty application. That’s the part I think they got wrong. I can’t ask them to verify that it was an Unlisted stream with a single view, and that view was me. And, that view was not during the time that the video violated the policy.
When I look at the policy, it states there should be no penalty to the channel. This is clearly our first violation of this policy. Why does this not apply to us?
Furthermore, I saw several places refer to this policy training? Why was that never offered to us. I think that was the bug in the review UI. It seems like that UI was tested for the case that a person would dispute the findings but was never tested for that path where we want to acknowledge and proceed.
Lack of Communication
There’s a frustrating lack of communication about this penalty. I saw places that said to check the Dashboard. The only card on the dashboard if this one and it didn’t show up until after I had disputed the claim:
I only did the appeal because there was no information about what was going on. I clearly said in my description that I was not appealing the video issue and that I wanted the video deleted. All I got in response was that the video violated their guidelines and no response to my comments. This card did not show up until days after the appeal was rejected.
The only other indication that anything is wrong is when we go to create a new live stream we get this:
It sure seems like their should be some indication somewhere that it is disable and why and for how long. The only “why” we got was the one email in the screenshots above.
Feature Eligibility
In some of the help content, I am told to go to the feature eligibility. Nothing is disabled there. It should show live streaming or something disabled.
Where to now?
So, the biggest frustration is that I have no idea what step to take next. Should we just create a new channel / account? No one will say if this is a temporary or permanent situation. If temporary, there’s no indication of how long. 90 days? When did the 90 days start?