Tuesday Tune-Up #503

News
hannahcurrey

Twitch confirms massive data breach
Twitch has confirmed that it suffered a data breach last week – as the result of a hack ominously labelled as “Part One”, suggesting there could be more to come – and says it’s “working with urgency to understand the extent” of the issue. So far, the leak doesn’t appear to include passwords or address information belonging to Twitch users. However, it does include three years’ worth of details regarding creator payouts, the entirety of twitch.tv, source code for the mobile, desktop, and video game console Twitch clients, an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios, and more.

Facebook’s outage spells good news for Telegram
Telegram, the popular cross-platform messaging app, has reported that it gained a “record” of 70 million new users last week when Facebook’s suite of apps experienced a nearly six-hour-long outage across its services. The jump represents an increase of over 10 per cent compared to the 500 million monthly active users Telegram had the last time it reported a similar surge in new signups back in January.

Pinterest rolls out new shopping features for advertisers
Online shopping is getting a glow-up on Pinterest, with the platform rolling out new features for advertisers and brands to promote their products to users on the site. A new ‘slideshow for collections’ feature pulls products from brands’ catalogues and automatically turns them into a collections ad. This will enable advertisers to create video-like content tailored to individual users. ‘Merchant details’ is another new addition, allowing brands to showcase values such as “responsibly sourced” and “inclusive” on their profile. Companies can also highlight communities that they are a part of, such as “women-owned” and Black-owned.”

YouTube opens its auto-Livestream captions to all creators
YouTube has confirmed that its automatic Livestream captions will now be available for all creators – instead of just those channels with more than 1,000 subscribers – helping to further improve the platform’s accessibility for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. In addition, over the coming months, YouTube has also said that it will be expanding its language support for live and auto-translate captions to 12 more languages, including Japanese, Turkish and Spanish. 

Twitter drops live broadcast co-host feature to improve video quality 
Twitter has said that it will no longer be supporting the option for users to invite guests when they go live on the platform; a feature it first introduced in March 2020. However, the platform says the change is intended to improve the video quality of its live broadcasts – perhaps users will just have to make do with the shared live audio feature if they want to share the stage in future.

Snapchat launches Spotlight Challenges
It’s time to fill those wallets! Snapchat is adding another way for creators to earn cash with Spotlight Challenges, which will reward a handful of creators each week for making videos using specific Lenses, doing certain activities, or playing a chosen sound on the app’s Spotlight feature. Around three to five creators will be compensated for each challenge, with the winners being selected from among the most-viewed eligible videos. The challenges are rolling out now in the US – with more markets to follow – and prize pools will range from $1k to $25k, with the minimum payout being $250. Sign us up.

Ones to watch
Twitter is testing a new set of prompts on iOS and Android that will warn users before they jump into a conversation that could get heated.