raysIf there is enough concern that people streaming aren't playing TF2 but still appearing on the sidebar, maybe look into how SRL does it?
They recently updated their site to include a sort of "auto-detect" feature (which has been in place for awhile admittedly, but they've recently become much more transparent about it), to where if you're on their approved list of streamers, then when you go live, the site checks your stream title for certain keywords. Words such as any%, attempts, practice, runs, routing, rtas, learning, etc., are considered "speed-run friendly" and as a result allow the stream to be displayed on the front page. Conversely, if you have the words/tag [nosrl], "lets play", casual, etc., then you're automatically removed from the front page.
They also give users to ability to edit their profile to switch from auto-detect mode, to always on the front page, to always hidden. Something like this would allow people who want to stream privately for a few friends or something the option to take themselves off of the site.
If TFTV adopted something like this, maybe some key words that could automatically be detected would be things such as scrim, dm, match, hl, 6s, pugs, pubs, etc., and then perhaps a "[notftv]" tag, or something similar that people could add to hide themselves if they weren't playing TF2?
That being said, I know that would be a bit of work to set up and code, and I'm fine with things the way they are. Just offering some potential solutions if it gets to be that big of a problem. I do think that the TF2 community is quite a bit smaller though, and hiding streams would make things difficult for a smaller streamer to grow their audience and introduce them to a variety of games when they'll only be shown to a select group of people when playing a single game.
Here's a bit more info on the SRL auto-detect feature:
http://puu.sh/cZt2g/d9b6c4ad74.jpg
when can we get this?