Twitch on Wednesday announced it will begin limiting streamers to 100 hours of highlights and uploads, and will delete content if a channel exceeds the limit. The company said it’s introducing the change because highlights haven’t been effective in driving discovery or engagement, and because storage is costly. The storage cap goes into effect on April 19.
The change applies to highlights, which are snippets edited from a channel’s past broadcasts, as well as other uploaded content.
Clips and past broadcasts (VODs) won’t be impacted by the change, however. (Past broadcasts are already automatically deleted after a certain period of time.)
Twitch’s announcement comes the same week that Facebook said that live videos will now only be stored on its platform for 30 days, after which they will be deleted. The company is also removing past broadcasts in the coming months.
Twitch said it originally launched highlights to help streamers create highlight reels of their best moments, but that other features like Clips, Tags, and the Mobile Discovery Feed are more effective in driving discovery or engagement.
“Despite low effectiveness, some users have accrued thousands of hours of Highlights and Uploads (often used to create Highlights) over time,” the company shared in a blog post.
“The storage of this content is costly. Introducing this 100-hour storage limit, which impacts less than 0.5% of active channels on Twitch and accounts for less than 0.1% 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.”
Some streamers have taken to social media to share their discontent with the decision, with many pointing out that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a market leader in cloud services through its AWS platform.
Streamers whose channels are over the limit after this data will have their highlights and uploads automatically deleted, starting with highlights with the least views. Twitch is encouraging users to download or export their content ahead of the deadline.
