Twitch's most popular streamer is taking on the Olympics, for better or worse

On July 27, Félix “xQc” Lengyel watched a YouTube clip of a badminton match from the Tokyo 2020 Olympics before a Twitch audience of over 50,000 viewers. For most of the video’s more than 10-minute duration, Lengyel’s mouth was agape in astonishment. “Ahhhh!” he yelled as one badminton player dove for a lightspeed save. “He’s doing splits!” What Lengyel’s improvised commentary lacked in expertise, it made up for with enthusiasm. The next day, the International Olympic Committee got him suspended from Twitch.With over 9 million followers and concurrent viewer counts that regularly break 100,000, the often controversial Lengyel is by many measures the livestreaming platform’s biggest star. (Twitch is owned by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Washington Post.) When Lengyel’s Twitch channel was disabled late last month, it came in the wake of what he and other streamers call a “DMCA”; an organization (in this case, the IOC) invoked the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act to require Twitch to take his channel offline to avoid being held responsible for his copyright violation. The past week on Twitch has been defined by Lengyel’s decision to contest that DMCA — to, in effect, challenge the Olympics.“This is transformative content,…
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