Twitch limiting uploads to 100 hours, deleting the rest starting April 19th
175 comments
·February 20, 2025badlibrarian
Dylan16807
> Focusing on video game material instead of being neutral and coming up with a reasonable business model that makes sense for all your customers (then communicating it up front) is the problem. There's always going to be a subset of customers that pushes the envelope.
Are you implying that the videos getting hit by this are not generally video game content?
I don't think that's right. In particular there's a lot of speedrun recordings that are going to disappear when this day hits.
(The HN title had to cut some of the explanation for brevity, probably 99% of what is going to get deleted is long highlights, not uploads.)
genewitch
if you know of any speedruns that are going to be lost, and you care, upload them to youtube and then link them on speedrun.com or something. Expecting one of the richest companies in america to just "host video" for users is too much.
wpm
Twitch’s largest category is “just chatting”. A large chunk of the content they serve has nothing to do with video games.
badlibrarian
That's because it's the catch all that won't get you banned for setting the wrong category.
rchaud
And yet it is not Vimeo who has to delete petabytes of data to cut costs.
badlibrarian
Not the point of my original post, but Vimeo is famous for layoffs and firing expensive customers, too. In March 2022 they told some users that their channels would now cost thousands of dollars a month.
EfficientDude
Just to be clear - no video streaming site or service has been profitable in the long run, not yet anyway.
StressedDev
Netflix is very profitable. Its net income for 2022 was $4.4 billion; for 2023 it was $5.4 billion; and in 2024 it was $8.7 billion. For more information, go to https://ir.netflix.net/financials/quarterly-earnings/default... . The 2024 Q4 earning announcement has a spread sheet with Netflix's financial results for the last 3 years.
0xFF0123
I imagine they meant user content video streaming sites.
EfficientDude
Is that profit? Income isn't profit.
joseda-hg
Are there any numbers on YouTube? While I don't doubt their costs are orders of magnitude bigger that other services, they also operate at a different scale operate as a defacto music service (I'm not talking about YT Music), and have the largest pool of ads to serve
packetlost
iirc they turned a profit one quarter a few years ago but are otherwise a loss leader for Googles as business
cmcaleer
I guess it makes sense. I remember once upon a time that Twitch saved every broadcast, in full, forever. That sounds kind of ridiculous these days, but then again YouTube does still does that for everyone’s streams and makes it work. Are there very different economies of scale at work here or are Google just willing to pay the extra money?
jahsome
The post says this rule doesn't apply to past broadcasts. Presumably that means the rule only applies to uploaded videos. Which I did not even realize was a feature, and I've been an avid watcher and occasional broadcaster since the justin days.
Edit: others have explained elsewhere VODs are auto deleted after 60 days, and then must be converted to highlights, which will be affected. I think anyone who relies on Twitch VODs as a viewer or producer is a glutton for punishment anyway. The viewing experience is dreadful if I remember correctly, enough so I just wait for a YouTube upload anyway.
In my anecdotal experience, I have probably watched several thousands of hours of live content over the last decade-plus, and maybe a half dozen VODs.
noirbot
Twitch VODs aren't really any worse than any other way to watch video? I'll regularly use them when I see some stream I'm interested in while I'm busy with something else, or if I jump into something halfway and want to go back and watch the beginning.
What do you think is dreadful about it?
kalleboo
I watch a lot of VODs since I'm in the wrong timezone for all the streamers I follow.
To me the problems center mostly around their site and more so the mobile app seem to be designed to discourage watching VODs as much as possible, you really have to dig down to resume watching something you started watching yesterday.
jahsome
How to navigate to VODs for a channel is a complete mystery, especially on mobile. scrubbing through the video is far clunkier than it has any right to be in 2025. Ads are excessive.
Dylan16807
They inject a stupendous amount of ads compared to live content, otherwise they're fine. It's nice to see the chat.
The place where twitch really lacks isn't on vods, it's the fact that the live player can't pause or rewind at all.
philistine
So Twitch is justifying the deletion of content that is very seldom watched ... because the user experience is terrible.
This is a textbook management mistake.
pdimitar
True, that's why I download VODs that are not gated behind subscription with yt-dlp.
...Those that are of interest anyway, which turned out to be less than 1% of what I thought. :D
Twitch's player is indeed terrible and _loves_ to forget where you are. It's hard to believe this is still a problem in 2025...
wongarsu
However unlike Twitch, Youtube doesn't save recordings of livestreams over 12 hours. Which means that subathons (a format where viewers extend the duration of the stream by donating money) don't get recorded on Youtube.
unshavedyak
That annoys me quite a bit. I regularly watch Dota series and they can run for 10-14h regularly. It sucks to see it cut off after 12h.
achierius
Especially since that tail bit is often going to be the best part -- game 5 bo5 grand finals &c!
genewitch
Okay, but, this is known, right? So the streamer needs to tell yt-dlp to copy the stream to disk so they can re-upload it right after? In fact, this is possible to do programatically probably with some minor fiddling with OBS Studio, right?
is there a hosted product here? Pay-for-use video FXP?
mjrpes
It's interesting what this situation would be like if HDD capacity hadn't stopped its exponential growth in 2010: https://imgur.com/a/lWdcjX7
We would be at a penny per terabyte of space. If AV1 in HD can store 400 hours of video per TB, the roughly 24TB to store a 24/7 stream over the course of a year would cost only 25 cents. Providers could keep all video content indefinitely.
Perhaps there's some benefit to this exponential growth coming to an end. Imagine a surveillance state that had near limitless storage and could keep 24/7 recordings indefinitely of cameras on every street, house, vehicle, etc.
Dylan16807
Low quality video mixed with some key snapshots and full audio would only be about half a terabyte per year. So even with current pricing, a surveillance state can easily pay $3-10 dollars to store that if it wants to.
fc417fc802
Unfortunately that remains a concern. The current research on ML based video codecs is yielding almost unbelievable size results.
pdimitar
Where can I read more?
akimbostrawman
twitch is nowhere near the size of youtube even if streams are usually longer than videos. they also have probably not even 1% of the channel amount and at this point there are more streamer on youtube than twitch. if youtube (google) can, then twitch (amazon) should too.
bobnamob
I mean surely twitch(an Amazon brand) is leaning on the s3 scale econ for storage no?
dehrmann
> an Amazon brand
The word you're looking for is "frugality." This is a tail use case that isn't cheap to run.
ignoramous
> The word you're looking for is "frugality."
> https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles
Leadership principles? Are you saying some exec / director ("leader") is looking for a P&L bump for their promo doc?
mbasho
I don't understand why not just target abusive accounts. Maybe the speed running community will have to find a new home.
philipov
The big problem with this move is that it doesn't give people enough time to migrate, and they can't make new highlights while they struggle to download upwards of 3000 hours (in the multiple terabytes) of old video, at the same time as hundreds or thousands of other partners doing the same thing.
This affects far more people at a much higher scale than Twitch will admit, and the deadline given isn't enough for these data transfers to complete.
anon7000
It literally says it doesn’t apply to past streams?
jsheard
Isn't that exactly what they're doing? You have to draw the line for abuse somewhere, and they've drawn it at 100 hours.
ctrl-j
There are playthroughs of single games that are more than 100 hours. Even if you're only playing "short" games, you're looking at 6-10 hours, which means you only give your audience a library of 10-15 vods? Average games are 20-40, so 5?
Vod viewing on twitch is also a pain, ads every 10 minutes, buggy playback, and vods don't play in order.
What's going to happen is anyone currently storing their playthroughs on twitch is now going to export to youtube. So I guess they want youtube to get the ad rev.
asmor
It'll just make also streaming to YouTube (or other services) simultaneously more attractive. Apparently Twitch has exclusivity agreements with some people, but it's already pretty common to do this.
nilamo
Are there really 5+ day nonstop playthroughs? Are there just hours of no content while the streamer eats/sleeps? Why wouldn't that be split into multiple parts by the streamer, as a natural consequence of how it was recorded?
hibikir
And it might make sense, if the way youtube stores the video is more efficient. Ultimately live streaming/simulcasting are different that cold video. See how Netflix, having no problems doing efficient movie serving, doesn't do quite so great at providing a good experience in live events. And I'd bet that the storage model for youtube and Netflix is already quite different, as the number of total videos, and the distribution of who watches what, when and where, is quite different.
null
null
krykp
I would prefer views, to be honest. For example if some arbitrary content is stored for 2 months without anyone ever watching it, that feels reasonable for me to remove it, no one is watching it. Some video that is actually serving a purpose being culled just because of the arbitrary hour limit feels to me, a less reasonable stance.
In practice though I doubt this makes a huge difference either way, the vast majority of the people that can have noticeable amount of views on such already have their YouTube channels or other venues they are also making money from.
kevin_thibedeau
Then there will be an army of bots inflating view counts.
vasco
It says on the thing they will remove based on views, lowest first, to meet the quota.
jayd16
Seems like that policy would generate fake views.
Dylan16807
100 hours is way too small to represent abuse of the system.
Highlight one hour per week, or even half an hour per week, and you'll fly right over that limit.
bhickey
I don't think this will impact speedrunning much:
> This won’t apply to Past Broadcasts (VODs) or clips.
cbhl
On Twitch, Past Broadcasts (VODs) are already deleted after 60 days.
If you see a video-on-demand that is older than that, then that is an “upload” and not a “VOD” and thus is in-scope.
bhickey
Thanks for the clarification!
bakugo
Twitch only stores Past Broadcasts for 2 months before they're automatically deleted. If you want to keep them past the 2 months, you have to convert them into Highlights, which are affected.
So yes, this will absolutely affect the speedrunning community, and anyone else who has been using this method to archive old streams.
mrkramer
Speedrunners are worried: https://bsky.app/profile/summoningsalt.bsky.social/post/3lik...
bob1029
> the speed running community
I was under the impression that the principal objective of speed running was to get things done quickly. You should be able to fit a lot of valuable information within the quota if you are any good at it.
emacsen
This comes from a misunderstanding of what speedrunning is.
It's not merely doing something quickly; it's more akin to a sport.
The objective of speedrunning is to perform something you would do in a game in a record time, or it's now been somewhat expanded to sometimes include or mean some extraordinary feat in a game that may not be directly related to speed.
A speedrun of a game might mean to complete a game that would normally take months in (for example) "only 10 hours", in which case the speedrunner needs to be live for those ten hours. A recording is not an acceptable substitute due to issues of cheating[1].
Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.
[1] It's still possible to cheat live, but it's more complicated, more challenging, and there's a greater likelihood of being caught.
bob1029
> Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.
I am still not following why Twitch needs to maintain live copies of all the failed runs. Once you hit the objective, make that video the highlight or whatever to be persisted indefinitely.
Why would anyone care about watching several hours of something when they know ahead of time it's not going to be representative of a successful outcome? Iteration #17 out of hundreds can't possibly be valuable enough to justify the storage cost in even the most charitable of cases. It seems to me that most of speed running could be done completely offline without involving the internet and video capture technology (i.e., practicing a musical instrument).
heraldgeezer
[Ending] Baten Kaitos 100% Speedrun in 338 Hours, 43 Minutes and 26 Seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FezT4GTZj0g
:)
FAQ why its so long
- Why is it so long? In this game, items evolve over time. There is an item, the Shampoo, that takes literally 2 weeks (= 336 hours) to evolve into Splendid Hair.
Capricorn2481
Not really. That's like saying a wrestler is only in the match for a few minutes so why do they need all of that training.
Speedrunners are often playing the game or parts of the game hundreds of times. And they're usually performing techniques that take lots of precision and therefore lots of practice.
So they stream it all, documenting their attempts and trying new strategies in front of a live audience. They produce so much comment that there are YouTube channels that make documentaries about different speedrunners.
genewitch
one of the only long speedruns i ever watched was the ~28 hour Red Dead Redemption 2 speedrun. these are called like no-glitch any% runs, meaning no sidestepping content in a way that isn't intended (eg in gta using an ambulance to get over the gated walls). So "the fastest a game can be played from beginning to end credits, normally."
These are different than the glitch any% runs, which, for example, Fallout 4 is something like 34 seconds, you do something to fall through the ground and then run to a specific place and it triggers the <no spoilers>, end credits roll.
EfficientDude
Speedrunning is mostly cheaters using combinations of emulation, save states, etc. I don't think speedrunners actually speedrun on unmodified consoles in one go at all these days. Of course back in the day anything other than playing on a console attached to a TV would have been considered cheating and gotten you thrown out of the community.
crtasm
This is incorrect - look at the setup and verification required if you want to claim a record on a popular game.
You may be thinking of TAS (Tool Assisted Speedruns) which is a separate thing.
Vilian
Usually you should know about a subject before talking about, instead of talking shit
joseda-hg
It really depends, usually console vs emulation are separate categories, as are stuff like having external assists and such
genewitch
tomorrow evening around 5AM UTC i will try to have a "Show HN: Seamlessly move your VOD from twitch to youtube (or...)" there is a youtube-uploader (or was) that i've used in the past for unattended uploads. yt-dlp <twitch vod uri> | youtube-upload
I'm gunna charge $1000 a month with no free tier.
edit: oh well https://github.com/Zibbp/ganymede
taraindara
If less than 0.5% of users upload over 100hrs, then either this is an extreme penny pinching move, or some few in that 0.5% upload a massive overage of content.
Etheryte
This is the standard outcome for any type of hosting service that starts out with low/no limitations. The vast majority of the users use it in a way that's sustainable for both parties, and then there's a small subset of users who abuse the system to such an extent that it becomes financially infeasible. Nearly every free hosting service in history has jumped through these hoops at one point.
nutrientharvest
It's the latter. Some people abuse the system by highlighting the full length of every broadcast, turning their highlights section into a complete archive of their streams, which is not something Twitch ever wanted to offer.
MSM
I don't think it's fair to say twitch "never wanted to offer" when not long ago, that behavior was the base functionality. You could rewatch everyone's entire streams forever. There was a DMCA scare at some point when streamers were getting in trouble for their old streams having music and many took down all of their history, but before then you'd see years worth of streams for people
fcoury
I did that, but not as a way to abuse the system. I used to export all my streams to YouTube directly from Twitch without downloading it first. I would just trim the beginning of the stream and sometimes split in more than one video if I had multiple content in one stream. I have hundreds of videos starting from 2018. I just thought this was ok and now I'm going through the effort of exporting them individually to a youtube account. I wish they had offered at least a way to export or download them in batch.
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bogtog
[flagged]
juliangmp
>Asking ChatGPT That alone makes me want to discard your entire argument, but the answer is pretty simple: cost
Hosting huge amounts of video data throughout multiple data centers is just plain expensive. Some ads isn't gonna fix that, especially since twitch already has a frustrating amount of ads everywhere.
umanwizard
Every time anyone posts anything from ChatGPT, it gets immediately and massively downvoted. It’s clear the community doesn’t want this; please don’t post it!
thisgoodlife
I guess it’s the latter. If you can afford, give your users a generous offer, but never unlimited. Otherwise, some people will find very creative ways to abuse it.
jsheard
Yep, full time streamers run up a lot of hours.
https://bsky.app/profile/authorblu.es/post/3likxmdytys2l
Assuming ~6000kbit/sec that's about 17TB of archived video for that guy alone.
protimewaster
That's assuming none of that video is something that Twitch is storing for any other reason (i.e., other users have highlights of the same thing, or they would store the videos internally for some reason).
It's possible the actual additional storage requirements for that specific user are minuscule, since we don't know what data they are/aren't archiving themselves, if they're doing any deduplicating, etc.
mqus
yeah, kinda, but VODs (the automatic recordings) are not covered by this change. This is about edits & uploads, so stuff you would usually put on youtube. If you're a full time streamer and stream every day, Twitch will still provide your past streams for 2 (or 3? not sure) months (or less if you're not popular) and this will not change anything for you.
littlestymaar
That's just $500 worth of storage though (and your 6Mbps is likely bit high IMHO).
Billing the owner a few bucks each month the each thousand hours of extra storage would make much more sense than removing everything.
bloomingkales
That’s kind of the main consideration with production LLM apps right now. Really looking for a startup that solves this out of the box (llm credit payment system that manages the reality that remote LLM usage can never be unlimited).
Twitch will offer a premium sub for heavy users most likely.
tsunitsuni
0.5% of users is still a lot of people, especially on Twitch. Streaming with more than 11 viewers puts you in the top 3% already: https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1367868296473813001
pr337h4m
Short-sighted move, super long video data could be quite useful in the near future
EwanToo
Deleting it from the public site doesn't mean they're not keeping it for internal use...
anticensor
What if they intend to rotate storage, replacing old content by newer content over a period of 2 months, plus 100h/user of non-replaceable content?
washadjeffmad
The infographic says "New 100-Hour Highlights & Uploads Storage Limit".
Past Broadcasts (VODs) and Clips are unaffected.
moefh
Normal VODs already automatically "expire" (i.e., are automatically deleted) after a certain time. IIRC the time limit is between 7 and 60 days depending on your account type (e.g. whether you're a Twitch partner, whether you have Twitch Prime, etc.).
Making a VOD a highlight was a way around that -- Twitch would never delete those.
washadjeffmad
>Making a VOD a highlight was a way around that -- Twitch would never delete those.
I'm not disagreeing that it was common knowledge that this was a way for non-partners to circumvent the regular retention policies, which is why this 100-hour limit seems like a pretty generous compromise.
Clicking through random channels just now, I didn't see a single account with any Uploads, and most of the channels who had any content in Highlights seemed to use it pretty sparingly (<100 hours). It doesn't seem like a common practice, and Twitch doesn't seem like it's trying to eradicate history, just reign in some behavior that the platform didn't intend to support.
If you're aware of certain communities who've made a practice of highlighting their entire streams (beyond 100 hours) without being partnered, maybe you could promote them here so people could help archive them?
madshougesen
Are you sure about the time limit?
This VOD is over 2 years old [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1891768073](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1891768073)
phyzome
What ever for?
DecoySalamander
Supposedly for training models to generate gameplay videos, like what Microsoft (and others) have presented [0] recently.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-mu...
wongarsu
Also virtual environment creation, agent training, etc. For any given game you can create a small dataset of recordings of both player inputs and gameplay footage, use that to create a model that can derive inputs from looking at footage, and then create input sequences for your huge backlog of gameplay footage. From there you can use the backlog to train AI that either recreates realistic player actions from screen inputs, or AI that recreates the entire game (like the AI minecraft)
Not to mention the huge amount of voice samples and webcam footage you could use for more typical voice cloning, text to speech, human avatar creation, etc
whywhywhywhy
If people watch it currently then it has value in a training set.
Barrin92
The thing I don't understand about this, why not simply charge the creator for it? I know we live in the age of rent extracting (as per Varoufakis: feudal) internet platforms but markets do actually work. Creators should be customers of a platform like Twitch and pay for services provided and this ceases to be a problem.
If there's value in the VODs for content creators charge them for storage to at least break even, for VODs that don't get any views creators will have an incentive to delete them if they have to pay, problem solved. There's no need for arbitrary 100 hour limits or only targeting x% of creators, just use good old price signals.
rlpb
Perhaps they predict that not enough people would pay for it such that it's not worth developing such a product in the first place.
renewiltord
What I don’t get is how YouTube does this. I have all sorts of videos there for archival with very few views and they just keep them? I couldn’t blame them if they deleted the videos though I’d prefer to have some warning. This is a large amount of space for essentially socially useless junk.
chris_wot
Isn't this just happening on the highlights section? If so, seems reasonable - am I missing something?
protimewaster
I don't use Twitch much, but, based on what other users have said, I think highlights was the only part not already subjected to automatic deletion after 60 days.
So I think the reaction is because there's no now way to keep over 100 hours of video long term on Twitch?
gradientsrneat
That and non-streamed "uploads". Twitch refers to videos produced by streaming as VODs, which are not affected. Weird terminology.
mrkramer
In one of my thought experiments I was thinking would only audio livestreaming be viable social platform for content creators because audio is like 90% smaller in size and therefore you don't need to spend loads of money to setup and maintain audio livestreaming infrastructure.
Btw, I think there is an easy option to export your Twitch content to YouTube so that's another way of saving all the content.
AraceliHarker
YouTube has tons of videos saved, doesn't it? The key difference between YouTube and Twitch is profitability. Twitch has never been profitable, and although Amazon has given them free rein until now, they're likely facing pressure to start making money.
vasco
So online radio stations? I think its been tried a lot, for decades, and while I don't listen often it is not never. I think people gravitate towards spotify "radio" without anyone talking or podcasts for this use case though.
mrkramer
Yes online radio station plus social features like Twitch and even Twitch streamers could restream their live audio to this new audio platform.
When you think about social audio, who is number one? Spotify is music subscription service and it's not really YouTube for audio meant for content creators and SoundCloud is stuck in time and it never really took off.
I would like to see SoundCloud reimagined with new features and ideas.
vasco
I'm not sure, maybe you have something there but I believe that if people are as engaged as you describe for social features to make sense, commenting and stuff, they want to see the person as well. We are very visual.
madshougesen
Clubhouse was pretty big for a while.
X Spaces is also big-ish (?), but mostly used by crypto scammers.
mrkramer
Clubhouse was or still is live audio chat room for people, it's not full fledged audio livestreaming platform. Although like vasco said most of the people prefer visual content so idk how popular would be only audio livestreaming platform.
physicalscience
I think Mixlr (https://mixlr.com) might be sort of something you are describing. I know they have been around for a good while as well.
cwmoore
100 hours of video games sounds like a lot, but I’m not familiar with the use case.
Is this content searchable in any meaningful way for the client?
trackofalljades
Archive Team? (shines bat signal)
monero-xmr
Not everything is worth archiving for all eternity. Do we really need a 300 hour Final Fantasy 7 playthrough with 3 viewers archived for all eternity like it’s the Magna Carta
Funes-
But that's missing the point of what archiving content on the Internet tends to be mostly about: you cannot possibly go through all of it and decide what's worth archiving, so you archive it all by default. Then, you can skim through it or remove whatever you choose to.
StressedDev
If you want to pay for it, go for it. I suspect a lot of content on the Internet will never be missed if it was deleted.
juped
easy for you to say, mr. el memorioso
tdhz77
When we find out John Smith played final fantasy before establishing the earliest of human rights. Maybe?
dehrmann
There is this story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski and how film saved the photo, but this feels like a 1996 problem. In 2006, disk space was cheap enough to save all the photos.
https://professionalartistmag.com/how-film-saved-now-infamou...
null
Vimeo banned video game content in 2008. Users migrated to other sites that were soon worth far more than Vimeo.
Focusing on video game material instead of being neutral and coming up with a reasonable business model that makes sense for all your customers (then communicating it up front) is the problem. There's always going to be a subset of customers that pushes the envelope. This conflicts with short term growth strategies but perhaps there's a little room for ethics to sneak in.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/vimeo-bans-v...