Could one "trick" Twitch (and other streaming services) by fake "streaming" a pre-recorded gaming video?

Question

this is a hypothetical question regarding "security" & black hat "hacking" practices, even though I can't think of any use to it as it sort of defeats the purpose of live stream services.

But it's a sort of thought I had in my head. For reference, while I do have programming/security knowledge, I am absolutely clueless when it comes to Youtube/Twitch/streaming/etc... so please be tolerant of any idiotic things I might say lol :)

Basically, when it comes to gaming videos, there are two models (as far as I know):

1. The "Youtube Model" : where the player records himself, edits the video to make it look cooler, etc... this is the "older" version I think and the only one I am ever so vaguely familiar with.
2. The "Twitch Model" : where the player live streams his gameplay, usually through some direct to stream software like OBS Studio (it's the only one I know of, again, total noob sry).

In my mind, cheating would be a lot harder on model #2 (live stream/twitch) because, well, there are no edits. It's LIVE. (that's the purpose)

But what if someone were to record the gameplay before hand, make the edits - to make himself look cool, you know in Adobe ;) - and "fake" the streaming process. It should be relatively easy to do, instead of streaming the game you "stream" a prerecorded gameplay video.

I know there are a lot of competitive gaming things out there like speedrun competitions, etc... surely someone who works at Twitch or has experience with that sort of thing has already thought of this possibility. Have their ever been gamers caught doing that? And what are/could be the countermeasures a company like Twitch could implement?

This is basically just me brainstorming some weird idea I had, unfortunately I don't know enough about gaming to be able to come up with credible conjectures.

Thanks for your answers.

Nothing really, this is a hypothetical scenario.

Answer 1

The service (Twitch, YouTube, etc.) doesn't know or care that the source was or wasn't pre-recorded. (Assuming you haven't streamed the content before, of course.)

Doing the stream is as simple as something like...

ffmpeg -re -i pre-recorded.mp4 -codec copy rtmp://example.com/woot

The -re flag here in FFmpeg tells it to read the input in pseudo realtime rather than as fast as possible.

There are of course other methods, like simply playing a video directly into an encoder. Or, even just pointing a camera at a monitor playing a pre-recorded video.