Twitch on Wednesday announced it should begin limiting streamers to 100 hours of highlights and uploads, and can delete content if a channel exceeds the limit. The corporate said it’s introducing the change because highlights haven’t been effective in driving discovery or engagement, and since storage is expensive. The storage cap goes into effect on April 19.
The change applies to highlights, that are snippets edited from a channel’s past broadcasts, in addition to other uploaded content.
Clips and past broadcasts (VODs) won’t be impacted by the change, nevertheless. (Past broadcasts are already robotically deleted after a certain time frame.)
Twitch’s announcement comes the identical week that Facebook said that live videos will now only be stored on its platform for 30 days, after which they will likely be deleted. The corporate can be removing past broadcasts in the approaching months.
Twitch said it originally launched highlights to assist streamers create highlight reels of their best moments, but that other features like Clips, Tags, and the Mobile Discovery Feed are simpler in driving discovery or engagement.
“Despite low effectiveness, some users have accrued 1000’s of hours of Highlights and Uploads (often used to create Highlights) over time,” the corporate shared in a blog post.
“The storage of this content is expensive. Introducing this 100-hour storage limit, which impacts lower than 0.5% of energetic channels on Twitch and accounts for lower than 0.1% of hours watched, helps us manage resources more efficiently, maintain support of Highlights and Uploads, and proceed to take a position in recent features and enhancements to simpler viewer engagement tools like Clips and the mobile feed.”
Some streamers have taken to social media to share their discontent with the choice, with many declaring 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 could have their highlights and uploads robotically deleted, starting with highlights with the least views. Twitch is encouraging users to download or export their content ahead of the deadline.
