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Broadly speaking, we see two groups of fans (with some degree of overlap). Some fans follow competitive play – they have favorite teams, players, casters, tournaments — and want to consume content directly from tournament organizers who are producing events. Other fans have strong affinities to specific personalities, and they watch them play games, talk about games, and cast a variety of professional, amateur, and pub games. We want to make sure that there is content available that serves both groups of customers.



To that end, in addition to the official, fully-produced streams from the tournament organizer itself, we believe that anyone should be able to broadcast a match from DotaTV for their audience. However, we don’t think they should do so in a commercial manner or in a way that directly competes with the tournament organizer’s stream. This means no advertising/branding overlays, and no sponsorships. It also means not using any of the official broadcast’s content such as caster audio, camerawork, overlays, interstitial content, and so on. Finally, this is not permission for studios to broadcast each other’s events. In general, everyone should play nice together, and we think the boundaries should be pretty clear." - Valve in their Broadly speaking, we see two groups of fans (with some degree of overlap). Some fans follow competitive play – they have favorite teams, players, casters, tournaments — and want to consume content directly from tournament organizers who are producing events. Other fans have strong affinities to specific personalities, and they watch them play games, talk about games, and cast a variety of professional, amateur, and pub games. We want to make sure that there is content available that serves both groups of customers.To that end, in addition to the official, fully-produced streams from the tournament organizer itself, we believe that anyone should be able to broadcast a match from DotaTV for their audience. However, we don’t think they should do so in a commercial manner or in a way that directly competes with the tournament organizer’s stream. This means no advertising/branding overlays, and no sponsorships. It also means not using any of the official broadcast’s content such as caster audio, camerawork, overlays, interstitial content, and so on. Finally, this is not permission for studios to broadcast each other’s events. In general, everyone should play nice together, and we think the boundaries should be pretty clear." - Valve in their official Blog post

Subs and donations are the main way most streamers commercialize their product though, that's a very important and still massive grey area — David Gorman (@LDeeep) 14 October 2017

Valve: "In general, everyone should play nice together"The confusion over broadcast rights has been building up over the past fortnight and Valve earlier this evening decided it was worth making an official announcement for. Several streamers such GrandGrant, BananaSlamJamma and AdmiralBulldog have all been left uncertain whether they are allowed or not allowed to stream matches from Valve's Pro Circuit events. The announcement comes the same day as AdmiralBulldog revealed Starladder threatened to ban him if he continued streaming their Minor."We believe that anyone should be able to broadcast a match from DotaTV for their audience," said Valve in the blog post. They went on to say in the statement below that those streams however, must not be done "in a commercial manner".This confirms the general public's consensus that streaming through DotaTV is allowed but means streamers that use overlays or adverts on their stream such as AdmiralBulldog or GrandGrant will most likely need to remove them.