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Twitch limiting uploads to 100 hours, deleting the rest starting April 19th
- DeepSeaTortoise 2y agoWonder if there's going to be a bidding war between sponsors on who gets to keep their videos
- pr337h4m 2y agoShort-sighted move, super long video data could be quite useful in the near future
- washadjeffmad 2y agoThe infographic says "New 100-Hour Highlights & Uploads Storage Limit". Past Broadcasts (VODs) and Clips are unaffected.
- moefh 2y agoNormal 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 2y ago>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?
- mistercheph 2y agoJeff?
- moefh 2y agoI remember when Twitch implemented the VOD expiration with the "highlight" system; the discourse at the time was that some people enabled VOD retention and then forgot about it, uselessly clogging the servers. So if you really cared about retaining VODs, you just had to highlight them. I think they just counted on no one caring enough, since highlighting every single VOD is a pain. It turns out that most people who cared enough about retaining VODs just upload them to Youtube. Youtube is simply a better viewing experience for non-live videos, and it can generate some revenue (though usually very small, unless you have a huge amount of views). One problem with Youtube is that it's more strict about (what it thinks is) copyright content -- for example, some otherwise "free"[1] videogame music is regularly claimed by on Youtube by someone who sampled the original song, so it registers as someone else's content to Youtube's content ID. [1] By "free" I mean that original videogame music is not usually actively protected (even though it's under copyright), because publishers love when people promote their games.
- madshougesen 2y agoAre 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](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1891768073 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1891768073)
- moefh 2y agoWell, the settings page on Twitch has this help text on the "store past broadcasts" toggle: Automatically save broadcasts for up to 7 days (14 days for Affiliates, 60 days for Partners, Turbo and Prime users) Maybe the video you're seeing is a highlight? Either way, I can't see it because I don't subscribe to Khaldor (I used to love watching his Starcraft 2 casts back in the day, though).
- EwanToo 2y agoDeleting it from the public site doesn't mean they're not keeping it for internal use...
- anticensor 2y agoWhat 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 2y agoWhat ever for?
- DecoySalamander 2y agoSupposedly 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-muse-our-first-generative-ai-model-designed-for-gameplay-ideation/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-mu...
- wongarsu 2y agoAlso 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 2y agoIf people watch it currently then it has value in a training set.
- chris_wot 2y agoIsn't this just happening on the highlights section? If so, seems reasonable - am I missing something?
- protimewaster 2y agoI 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 2y agoThat and non-streamed "uploads". Twitch refers to videos produced by streaming as VODs, which are not affected. Weird terminology.
- mbasho 2y agoI don't understand why not just target abusive accounts. Maybe the speed running community will have to find a new home.
- bhickey 2y agoI don't think this will impact speedrunning much: > This won’t apply to Past Broadcasts (VODs) or clips.
- cbhl 2y agoOn 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 2y agoThanks for the clarification!
- bakugo 2y agoTwitch 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 2y agoSpeedrunners are worried: https://bsky.app/profile/summoningsalt.bsky.social/post/3liklhvzqyc2h https://bsky.app/profile/summoningsalt.bsky.social/post/3lik...
- jsheard 2y agoIsn't that exactly what they're doing? You have to draw the line for abuse somewhere, and they've drawn it at 100 hours.
- trackofalljades 2y agoArchive Team? (shines bat signal)
- monero-xmr 2y agoNot 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- 2y agoBut 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 2y agoeasy for you to say, mr. el memorioso
- StressedDev 2y agoIf 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.
- tdhz77 2y agoWhen we find out John Smith played final fantasy before establishing the earliest of human rights. Maybe?
- dehrmann 2y agoThere 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-infamous-clintonlewinsky-photo/ https://professionalartistmag.com/how-film-saved-now-infamou...
- badlibrarian 2y agoVimeo 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-video-game-clips-for-lack-of-creative-expression/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/vimeo-bans-v...
- EfficientDude 2y agoJust to be clear - no video streaming site or service has been profitable in the long run, not yet anyway.
- joseda-hg 2y agoAre 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 2y agoiirc they turned a profit one quarter a few years ago but are otherwise a loss leader for Googles as business
- acchow 2y agoYouTube profits aren't broken out separately. However, Google's quarterly and annual reports do give Youtube Ad revenues, which were $36bn in fiscal 2024. That Youtube is not profitable is quite the strong claim..... https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425000014/goog-20241231.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...
- mattmaroon 2y agoIf this is a thing that really matters, it wouldn't be that hard to build a competitor right?
- claudex 2y agothe 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 2y agoOf 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 2y agoYea, 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!).
- mattmaroon 2y agoIt's been awhile since I was in that world, but I have to imagine that if you have a site whose traffic is growing at a good rate, you don't need to pitch that many investors. Some seed funding could get you enough runway to pay the AWS bills. You very rarely hear of the startup who ran out of money because they had too much traffic.
- mrkramer 2y agoIn 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.
- vasco 2y agoSo 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 2y agoYes 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 2y agoI'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 2y agoClubhouse was pretty big for a while. X Spaces is also big-ish (?), but mostly used by crypto scammers.
- mrkramer 2y ago
- cmcaleer 2y agoI 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?
- bobnamob 2y agoI mean surely twitch(an Amazon brand) is leaning on the s3 scale econ for storage no?
- dehrmann 2y ago> an Amazon brand The word you're looking for is "frugality." This is a tail use case that isn't cheap to run. https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles
- ignoramous 2y ago> The word you're looking for is "frugality." > https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles 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?
- anon7000 2y agoYou have to regurgitate (reframe your personal story in the context of) leadership principles in your interviews for an IC role too.
- genewitch 2y agoIndividual Contributor, a euphemism for "non-management"? copilot is usually pretty good with deciphering contextual acronyms. Why "IC" instead of "NM"?
- AraceliHarker 2y agoIsn't it mostly Twitch Partners who save a lot of videos?
- jjice 2y agoI have no idea, but I'd assume the opposite. Twitch partners seem to make up the vast majority of streams from what I've seen. I you take any game and scroll down, there are so many people with 0 to 2 viewers (probably another open tab or a friend) that are generating video that would be stored, but not generating revenue unlike something like a large video game tournament. I'd guess it's something like 99% of content is seldom, if ever viewed, but I have no clue. As for videos over 100 hours, it may be mostly top streamers.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 2y agoWhat 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.
- Barrin92 2y agoThe 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 2y agoPerhaps they predict that not enough people would pay for it such that it's not worth developing such a product in the first place.
- cwmoore 2y ago100 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?
- taraindara 2y agoIf 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.
- nutrientharvest 2y agoIt'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 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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 2y ago[flagged]
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- fsflover 2y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137085
- aestetix 2y agoI actually submitted this two days ago, as you can see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aestetix https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aestetix I wonder why it's showing "2 hours ago" and it's now showing up.
- davethedevguy 2y agoCould be the second chance pool https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309
- eieio 2y agoIt is! You can see the pool here: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool And this submission shows up there (it's on the second page at the time that I write this comment)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]