Twitch is planning to cull some of the content archived by streamers to save on storage costs. On Wednesday the streaming platform announced that it will introduce a 100-hour storage cap for Highlights and Uploads starting April 19th, warning that users will have their content automatically deleted until it falls below the limit.
Twitch says it’s doing this because “Highlights haven’t been very effective in driving discovery or engagement,” and it isn’t worth the cost of storing thousands of hours of such content. Twitch is owned by Amazon, a market-leading cloud storage provider — a detail that hasn’t gone unnoticed by streamers criticizing the decision.
The update only applies to Highlights — specific snippets edited from recordings of live broadcasts (VODs) using the Highlighter tool to showcase the streamer’s best moments — and uploaded footage created using third-party services. Other kinds of on-demand content, including Clips and VODs (the latter of which are already automatically deleted) won’t be impacted by the new storage limit.
Twitch users who have already exceeded the cap can download Highlights and Uploads before the restrictions take effect, after which content will be deleted starting with Highlights with the least views. To make it easier to decide which videos to keep, Twitch is rolling out a new storage tracker on the Video Producer page, and the ability to filter Highlights and Uploads by length, view count, and creation date. It won’t be possible to go over 100 hours of Highlights and Uploads once all users have been brought below the limit.
“Introducing this 100-hour storage limit, which impacts less than 0.5 percent of active channels on Twitch and accounts for less than 0.1 percent of hours watched, helps us manage resources more efficiently, maintain support of Highlights and Uploads, and continue to invest in new features and improvements to more effective viewer engagement tools like Clips and the mobile feed,” Twitch said.
The automatic deletions and 100-hour cap will notably impact Twitch’s speedrunning community, whose history is largely archived through Highlights. While Highlights and Uploads can be exported and uploaded to other platforms, the process is laborious and may interfere with how speedrunning records have been documented on the web.
“Not just world records, but most every run submitted that was on Twitch is stored as a highlight on speedrun.com. That includes users who no longer run, no longer stream, no longer have an online presence, or may even not be alive anymore,” one Twitch forum user noted. “Crippling the highlights feature is going to be an unmitigated disaster for speedrun history.”
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