Twitch on Wednesday announced that it will begin limiting streamers to 100 hours of highlighting and uploading, and that it will remove content if the channel exceeds the limit. The company said it is implementing changes because highlights are not effective in driving discovery and engagement, and storage is expensive. The storage cap will take effect on April 19th.
This change applies to edited snippets from channel's past broadcasts, as well as other edited highlights from uploaded content.
However, clips and past broadcasts (VODs) are not affected by the changes. (Past broadcasts have already been automatically deleted after a certain period of time.)
The Twitch announcement will be the same week that Facebook said live videos will be saved on the platform for only 30 days and then deleted. The company is also removing past broadcasts in the coming months.
Twitch said that although it originally launched highlights to help streamers create highlight reels for their best moments, other features like clips, tags and mobile discovery feeds are effective in driving discovery and engagement It's target.
“Even though it's not effective, some users have gained thousands of hours of highlights and uploads (often used to create highlights) over time. “I did,” the company shares in a blog post.
“It's expensive to store this content. We'll introduce this 100-hour storage limit, which will affect Twitch less than 0.5% of active channels and account for less than 0.1% of monitored time. , helping you manage your resources more efficiently, maintain support for highlighting and uploading, and continue your new investments with more effective viewer engagement tools such as clips and mobile feeds.
Many have pointed out that some streamers have decided to complain about social media, and that it is owned by Amazon, the market leader in cloud services through the AWS platform.
Streamers whose channels exceed the limit after this data will automatically remove highlights and uploads and begin with the view with the lowest highlight. Twitch encourages users to download or export content prior to deadlines.