Twitch Bans Pokimane for Watching Avatar: The Last Airbender on Stream

Imane "Pokimane" Anys has been suspended from Twitch for 48 hours after reportedly receiving a live DMCA takedown while watching Avatar: The Last Airbender on stream.

Pokimane, one of the largest content creators and streamers in the gaming world regardless of the platform, has her 8.5 million follower Twitch profile taken down at the moment, but it appears she will be able to be back online after the weekend.

The world of Twitch content has evolved in many ways in recent years, and it appears 2022 will be no exception.

With games such as Call of Duty: Warzone Pacific continuing to draw major complaints from their communities, and others seemingly just growing stale, it's perhaps no surprise that a handful of Twitch's biggest faces have turned to something else to do on stream — reacting to and marathoning old TV shows.

From MasterChef to Naruto, viewers from around the world can tune into their favorite stream to watch, pop jokes in chat, and generally experience episodes live in a group containing others with a similar sense of humor.

However, unlike with gaming and esports events, where the parties involved have long established that they indeed want their titles to be streamed to generate interest or increase sales, there are plenty of undefined boundaries with playing TV shows and movies on stream.

There are newer shows such as Arcane specifically publicizing and encouraging content creators to host watch parties. Otherwise, however, this case shows the risk involved in engaging in this sort of content.

As tweeted by Pokimane on Jan. 7, she did indeed get banned for watching about 11 episodes of Avatar live but plans to be back with a 12-hour stream on Monday.

Avatar: The Last Airbender, which aired on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008, has since led to a full-on American multimedia franchise owned by ViacomCBS, consisting of a sequel animated television series, a live-action film, comics, books, video games, home media, and soundtracks, with more works on the way.

According to Twitchtracker, Pokimane had, on average, about 25,000 concurrent viewers during the stream.

Twitch has had a renowned history of removing content after receiving DMCA takedown requests from companies, mostly having to do with playing copyrighted music on stream.

Whether or not this instance has any sort effect on the Just Chatting "TV meta" will be interesting to follow.