Twitch limiting uploads to 100 hours, deleting the rest starting April 19th
130 comments
·February 20, 2025badlibrarian
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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!
mrkramer
Speedrunners are worried: https://bsky.app/profile/summoningsalt.bsky.social/post/3lik...
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.
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.
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.
joseda-hg
It really depends, usually console vs emulation are separate categories, as are stuff like having external assists and such
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?
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?
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.
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)
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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...
mattmaroon
If this is a thing that really matters, it wouldn't be that hard to build a competitor right?
Figs
The competitor already exists and at least some people are already using it: PeerTube.
Run it yourself, and you can save whatever videos your community cares about for as long as you fucking feel like because YOU OWN IT. None of YouTube's asinine copyright strike bullshit to worry about -- if a company has a problem with your use of something they need to send you a real DMCA notice. None of Twitch's random policy change bullshit to worry about. No advertising. If your community actually gives a shit about the content then they will pitch in to pay for the hosting through Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi, etc -- or mirror it themselves. Any streamer with a decent number of viewers will almost certainly have someone in the audience who is technically capable of running an instance if the streamer can't or doesn't want to DIY.
I get being on YouTube and Twitch -- PeerTube's discoverability sucks -- but for goodness sake, take ownership of your archives! If you make videos, that is your long tail! That is your legacy! Own it!
brudgers
It is as hard or easy as finding the right people. For reference, Amazon bought Twitch for about a billion dollars instead of trying to build it.
claudex
the problem to build a competitor is the community, not the technical part. If one (or a handful of) streamer move elsewhere, most of the viewers won't follow him
mattmaroon
Of course. But we've seen it happen before. Digg had a huge lead on Reddit, angered the community enough that they left. Myspace v Facebook. Etc.
I don't use Twitch deeply so I'm not sure if this is a big enough thing to make people switch in large numbers, but if it is, the tech stack just doesn't seem like a moat at all these days. If anything, I'd say the fact that they prune old content already sort of is the opposite. YouTube's deep content library makes it hard to compete with them. Twitch purposefully doesn't even have one.
A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS bill became significant.
jmholla
Yea, but, in addition, Twitch has a very expensive business to run. Video is orders of magnitude more data than pictures and audio which are itself magnitudes above text. The costs in your example are wildly different.
And the culture. Your examples are from the 2000s. The culture of the Internet back then was vastly different than it is today.
> A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS bill became significant.
I disagree. Where is this magic funds button? You're gonna need quite the pitch to get an investor to invest LOTS of money going up against Amazon (edit: and Google!).
okdood64
> A skilled programmer
Running a massive video site is not as simple as throwing a bunch of skilled programmers at it...
AraceliHarker
That's exactly why Mixer failed to gain popularity, even after poaching streamers like Ninja from Twitch.
DeepSeaTortoise
Wonder if there's going to be a bidding war between sponsors on who gets to keep their videos
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...