Terms of Service
Last updated 1 August 2026
This is the agreement between you and Bright Side Streams. It covers what you get, what you pay, what you may not do, and what happens when something goes wrong. Plain English throughout — where a term has a legal meaning we say so rather than hiding it.
⚠️ Not yet reviewed by a lawyer. The operator name, address and governing law are now the real ones. The liability and disputes sections are the parts most worth a lawyer's time — they are what actually decides how a dispute goes, and they have not been read by one.
1. Accepting these terms
By creating an account or using the studio you agree to these terms, to the Acceptable Use Policy, and to the Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
You must be at least 13 to hold an account, and 18 or the age of majority where you live to buy a paid plan. If you are using Bright Side for an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.
2. Your account
Keep your password to yourself and tell us promptly if you think someone else has it. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including what your guests do in your rooms.
One person, one account. Team seats are available on plans that include them — sharing a single login between people is not a substitute.
3. Plans and studio hours
Paid plans include a monthly allowance of studio hours and relay hours. The current allowances and prices are on the pricing page and form part of this agreement.
- A studio hour is live time in the studio — recording, streaming, guests on stage. The clock starts when you press Start the show, not when you open the tab.
- The green room has its own monthly allowance, from 30 minutes on Lite up to 240 on Business, listed on the pricing page. Setting up, waiting for guests and testing your camera come out of that allowance rather than your studio hours. Once it is used up for the month, further green-room time counts as studio time at the normal rate. The allowance is monthly, not per session — closing the room and opening it again does not reset it, because the green room costs us the same bandwidth as a show and we would rather charge for it honestly than pretend it is free and price it into everything else.
- A relay hour is when you produce elsewhere, such as in OBS, and we forward your stream onward.
- Allowances reset each billing period and do not roll over.
- Going over your allowance does not stop your show. Extra studio hours bill at the overage rate for your plan, currently $1.49 to $2.99 per hour depending on plan. We will not cut off a show in progress.
- Extra hours are rounded up to the whole hour. Going one minute past your allowance is billed as one extra hour, and one hour and one minute as two. We round up because a bill you can check yourself is worth more than a fractional one you cannot — "three extra hours" is a number you can verify against your own shows, "2.4 extra hours" is not.
- Extra hours are added to your next invoice as a separate line, on your normal renewal date. We never take a separate payment mid-month.
- The Chill Spot plan is metered the same way, in room hours: one hour of one room is one hour, however many people are in it.
Metering may not suit you, and we would rather say so. If you are live more than about forty hours a month, a flat-rate plan elsewhere is likely cheaper and you should take it. Metering is what lets our plans start where they do.
4. Billing, renewal and cancellation
Subscriptions renew automatically. Your plan continues each month, or each year if you chose annual billing, and the card on file is charged the then-current price at the start of each period until you cancel. Overage from the previous period is charged with the renewal.
Cancel any time, in one click, from inside the studio. No email, no phone call, no retention conversation. Cancellation stops the next renewal; you keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for.
Payments are handled by Stripe. Prices exclude sales tax, VAT and equivalents, which Stripe calculates and shows in full before you enter a card.
If a payment fails we will retry and email you. If it keeps failing we may suspend the paid features until it clears. Your recordings are not deleted for a failed payment within their normal retention window.
We may change prices. Existing subscribers get at least 30 days' notice by email before a change affects them, and you can cancel before it takes effect.
Upgrades take effect immediately and are charged pro rata. Downgrades take effect at your next renewal, so you do not lose hours you have already paid for.
5. Refunds
If the service fails in a way that is our fault and we cannot put it right, write to us and we will refund the affected period. We would rather refund a frustrated customer than argue with one.
Beyond that, payments are generally non-refundable, and we do not refund unused hours in a period you have already started — cancelling stops the next charge rather than reversing the last one.
If you are a consumer in the UK or EU you have a statutory 14-day right to cancel a new subscription. By starting to use the studio within that period you agree we may begin supplying immediately, which may reduce or end that right once the service has been delivered. Nothing here removes rights the law gives you.
6. Your content, and who owns it
Your recordings are yours. We claim no ownership of your shows, your audio, your video, your artwork or your brand.
You grant us only the licence we need to actually run the service: to store, process, encode, transcribe and transmit your content so we can deliver it to you and to the destinations you choose. That licence ends when you delete the content, apart from backups that roll off within 30 days.
We do not use your recordings to train AI models and we do not licence them to anyone else.
What we own stays ours: the studio software, the backdrops, the sound effects, the Bright Side name and marks. Your plan lets you use the backdrops and sound effects inside your own productions. It does not let you extract, redistribute or resell them as assets.
7. Recording other people
This one matters more than it looks. Recording law is not the same everywhere. Some places require only one person in the conversation to consent; others require everyone to consent, and recording without it can be a criminal offence, not merely a civil one.
You are the host, so this is your responsibility. Before you record, make sure everyone in the room knows and agrees — including remote guests, who may be somewhere with stricter rules than yours.
We help where we can: everyone in a room sees a REC indicator while recording runs, and guests are asked to acknowledge recording before they join. That is a courtesy, not legal cover, and it does not transfer the responsibility to us.
8. What you may not do
The full list lives in the Acceptable Use Policy. In short: do not break the law with it, do not use it to harm people, do not stream content you have no right to stream, and do not attack or abuse the service itself.
9. Availability
We work to keep the studio running and we do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee. Maintenance, outages at our providers, and faults will occasionally interrupt service.
Live shows depend on your internet connection, your hardware, and the platform you are streaming to. Those are outside our control and we cannot be responsible for them.
Recordings are retained for the period stated on your plan. Download anything you cannot afford to lose. Your browser also keeps a local backup while you record, but treat your own copy as the real one.
10. Podcast hosting and your feed
On plans from $19.99 a month we can host your podcast: we publish an RSS feed at a Bright Side address and serve your episode audio to podcast apps. Hosting is included in the plan price — there is no separate charge and no cap on how many times an episode is downloaded.
Submitting your show is yours to do. We give you the feed address; you enter it with Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere else you want to appear. Those are independent services with their own rules, and we cannot promise any of them will accept, keep listing, or continue to carry your show. If a directory removes you, that is between you and them.
Your feed address stays put. We will not change or recycle it while your show is hosted with us. If we ever have to move it, we will tell you before it happens and keep the old address redirecting for at least 90 days, because a feed address that changes is a show that loses its subscribers.
What you publish is yours, and so is the responsibility for it. That includes anything you did not make yourself — music in particular. Podcast directories act on rights complaints quickly, and a claim against your episode is yours to answer. Section 6 covers ownership and section 8 covers what you may not publish; both apply to anything we host.
If you leave or drop below the hosting plans. Your feed does not disappear on the day your plan changes:
- For 12 months it goes read only. Everything already published stays live and keeps downloading normally, so nobody who subscribed loses the show. You cannot publish new episodes to it during that time.
- After 12 months we remove the feed and the hosted audio. We will email you at least 30 days beforehand, and you can download your recordings at any point before that.
- Coming back to a hosting plan inside those 12 months restores publishing to the same feed address, with nothing lost.
Availability. Hosting is covered by section 9 like the rest of the service: we work hard to keep it up and we do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee. Outages, maintenance and faults at us or at our providers will occasionally make episodes slow or briefly unreachable.
We can remove content. If something you publish breaks section 8, is the subject of a valid rights complaint, or exposes us to legal risk, we may take it down or suspend the feed. Where we can, we will tell you first and explain why.
Keep your own copies — we mean this. We are a place your show lives, not the only place it should exist. Download every episode and keep it on your own device or drive. Outages happen, providers fail, accounts get closed by mistake, and disasters are not hypothetical. We keep backups and we work hard not to lose anything, but the only copy nobody can take away from you is the one you are holding. If our copy is ever lost, damaged or removed, section 13 caps what we owe you — and no cap gives you back a recording you did not keep.
11. Ending the agreement
You can cancel or delete your account at any time.
We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy. Except where the breach is serious — illegal content, harm to others, or an attack on the service, where we may act at once — we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right. If we close your account without cause, we refund the unused part of the period you paid for.
After closure you have 30 days to request a copy of your recordings before they are deleted.
12. Warranties
The service is provided "as is". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free.
If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are not affected by anything in this section.
13. Limits of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost audience or lost recordings.
Our total liability to you, for any and all claims, is capped at the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.
Nothing in these terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.
You agree to indemnify us against claims arising from your content, your shows, your use of the service, or your breach of these terms — including a claim brought by someone you recorded.
14. Disputes and governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of South Carolina, USA, and the courts of South Carolina, USA have jurisdiction, without affecting any right you have as a consumer to bring proceedings where you live.
Before starting formal proceedings, email us. Most disputes are a misunderstanding and we would rather fix it than litigate it.
15. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. The date at the top always shows the current version. For material changes we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email, and continuing to use the service afterwards means you accept them. If you do not accept them, cancel before they take effect and we will refund the unused part of your period.
16. Contact
These terms are an agreement between you and Charles Hines of 3367 Moss Bridge Lane, Myrtle Beach, SC 29579, trading as Bright Side Streams.
For anything at all: support@brightsidestreams.com — a real person reads it.