There are a lot of channels and content creators that love to stream videos to their viewers 24/7. One of which, is ChilledCow.
The channel's popular LoFi hip-hop channel constantly live streams an anime girl endlessly doing her homework while wearing headphones. On the weekend, YouTube mistakenly terminated the account, ending the stream as a result.
ChilledCow owner Dimitri received a notification from YouTube saying that his channel violated the company’s terms of service and was suspended. The original live stream became a non-playable video, with users clicking on it seeing the “livestream recording is not available.”
With the mistake, ChilledCow produced one of the longest videos in YouTube history - more than 13,000 hours, and amassed 218 million views in the process.
A statement from YouTube’s support account on Twitter confirmed that the termination was “a mistake on our side.”
Thanks for flagging this to us! Our teams confirmed that this was a mistake on our side and your channel has now been reinstated. We’re sorry this happened! We've shared feedback with our review team to prevent similar errors from happening in the future.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 23, 2020
The streaming giant added that it has "shared feedback with our review team to prevent similar errors from happening in the future."
Dimitri then tweeted to his more than 30,000 followers about the issue:
My account has been unbanned, thank you from the bottom of my heart for the tremendous support, I'm grateful to have such an amazing community I will launch the stream again as soon as possible pic.twitter.com/hcAKB5wXWb
— ChilledCow (@ChilledCow) February 22, 2020
This isn’t the first time that ChilledCow’s live streams have gone down.
Previously, the channel went down July and October 2017, or just a few months after the live stream started.
This was because ChilledCow used a GIF taken from Studio Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart, which showed a young woman doing her homework, without permission. ChilledCow in using the GIF resulted in the channel receiving a copyright takedown request.
When the channel returned months later, the woman character was replaced with a copyright-free version of a different woman that Dimitri could use without worrying about copyright issues or his account being taken down.
Channels like ChilledCow operate in a grey zone of YouTube.
They can have a sort of porous relationship to intellectual property rules, and they are always in the risk of being terminated without notice. This is because these channels use songs, but don't own the music.
When ChilledCow’s channel went down, people on Twitter started paying their respects to their favorite anime character, with some saying that after two years of behind the desk, the girl in the video finally finished her homework.
ChilledCow has put up lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study up again, but as a new video which dates at February 22, 2020.
The livestream that has become the subject of countless memes continues.
