This is the stupidest idea ever. Highlights let us preserve all of our media on the website. Discovery was never their point. It is insane to suddenly pull this with only 2 months warning. Many of us have been streaming for YEARS and I myself have well over A THOUSAND hours of highlights for permanent vods. Twitch has no excuse, no reason, and no brains to pull something like this except to make US pay THEM for storage. Which is 100% what this is going to lead to. Make them hemorrhage money if they do this. Make them see we are not numbers to toy with.

the only reason this change is going through is to save money, which ironically is going to turn many creators away and have them go to their competitor, youtube, which will lose them money. this is a change that clearly isn't thought out well, and is to save money in the short term and lose out in the long term. they'd make more money keeping their creators here and making highlights profitable.

little kids trying to bait found this thread. oh well, keep discussing and let's move forward.

iHateuChat, everything you're describing is why this change is misguided. YouTube is a competitor to Twitch. It shouldn't be the case that the best long-term home for Twitch videos is somewhere other than Twitch. Twitch needs to invest in its Highlights and discovery systems so that Highlights can generate more revenue and watch time, rather than axing a program that many people have come to appreciate and that Twitch set up to fail financially from the get-go.

This is a good change, It's hard to blame anyone but yourself that you didn't take the time to re-upload the vods to Youtube , A lot of this is just the pure lazy convenient side of things where people could 1 click and save as a highlight. Imagine if you would have taken all these "Highlights" to Youtube where they belong ages ago they may have actually made you revenue for views.

I also want to echo Schtolteheim's comment in the harm this is going to do to speedruns and their history on Twitch. Twitch has a long history with the speedrunning community and this would be a huge blow to us.

Using a time-based limit instead of size-based is even more damaging to our community because many of our vods are much smaller in size compared to the standard 1080p stream of today. Please consider reversing this decision or at the very least give us more options and time to preserve our history.

blindsiding people with a 2 month timer (basically) to move or lose everything is evil. people have been gathering highlights for YEARS and you're only giving 2 months to transfer everything?

I’m going to assume that this awful change won’t be rescinded, which in case the following would be great:

1. EXTEND THE DEADLINE for automatic highlight expungement from 60 days out to 180 days. Two months notice is simply not enough. For my streamer’s channel we’re talking about 7-8 months worth of VODs turned into highlights which I estimate could be upwards of 3 terabytes of content that will quite a bit of time to move. I can’t begin to imagine how much of a burden this will be for channels that have been archiving VODs as highlights for years.

2. STOP BLOCKING channels from creating new highlights that are over the new limit as there was no prior notice that such a limitation was coming. Don’t block channels from this for at least 30 days.

3. STOP MAKING MASSIVE CHANGES without discussing it with the creator community. This isn’t about asking permission from streamers, it’s about getting feedback from the people these changes affect the most about how to get through it as painlessly as possible. Creators may not have convinced you not to take this awful step but if Twitch had taken time to talk about it with them, I bet we wouldn’t all now be stuck with “you can’t highlight anything new until you have 100% completely dealt with this change which could end up taking days if not weeks of work to sort out”.

4. CREATE A PAID OPTION for content creators who wish to keep VODs permanently on Twitch or who wish to have more storage for highlights. If this isn’t viable then at least you tried to address your problem (storage space) in the least disruptive way, instead of just steamrolling over everyone.

Thanks.

Hey man I think it would be totally awesome if you provided your content creators, the reason why your site exists at all, with another reason to make another platform their primary. Really incredible idea you should move forward on :^)

I just want to echo Schtolteheim's comment -- please consider the harm this does to the legacy of speedrunning communities and history. Twitch has a responsibility to preserve this history and execute a rollout like this more responsibly to allow preservation of important moments in speedrunning history which don't exist anywhere except on Twitch.

i said this on the other uservoice page, i'll copy it here:

i am not even an affiliate and i don't even have 100 followers at the moment. and even i'm over the limit. it's just a bunch of disco elysium vods and a few other streams i've saved for friends. to say that it's "only 0.5% of streamers" is so silly, probably inflating the total number of streamers with the people who streamed to 1 viewer and quit forever. everyone i know who has ever actually put any time and effort into their streams also used highlights to keep memorable moments. also this new limit came into effect IMMEDIATELY. it's already impossible to make new highlights if you're over the limit which has affected EVERY STREAMER THAT I KNOW.

it's so horrible that they choose a little bit more money over a feature that so many people use and enjoy. i hope they change their mind, but we will never forgive them for trying this in the first place, especially since they're blindsiding us with it and are trying to implement it in only two months without gauging interest or how it'll hurt/affect users first. this idea is purely selfish of them to do.

I have 1662h and 53 minutes of highlighted vods, apparently...this may take a while. But yes. Twitch, please reconsider.

I will adapt and upload no harm done, but others, inactive people and people who passed away? Not so much.

I dislike it when the justification for decisions like this is "it only affects 0.5% of users" when that 0.5% of users is producing the majority of the content on the site.

It's a deliberate mis-use of statistics for disingenuous gaslighting, for the sole purpose of pretending like the impact of such a decision will be minor. The reality is that twitch is screwing with its core content creators simply to save a few pennies in storage.

Forcing your core content creators to build archives on competing services is not a sound business decision.

I have so many highlights, and downloading them one by one takes SO LONG. If you had a better way to download highlights faster then it's one thing but 2 months is a really short amount of time for someone who's been streaming and highlighting for a DECADE

Two months is frankly not enough time to save everything with the current tools available on twitch. I would need to upload most, if not all of my current highlights to Youtube, and Twitch's export system is unstable and confusing to use on the best of days. I don't have nearly as many VoDs compared to some other streamers, but I have streams going back over a decade that I want to keep intact.

This 100-hour limit will cause irreparable damage to speedrun communities if implemented. The vast majority of speedrunners rely on Twitch highlights to create concise speedrun VODs out of hours-long streams, which are then submitted to speedrun leaderboards for approval.

Not only will every speedrunner need to back up and re-upload EVERY relevant VOD to YouTube or other websites, but those VODs will then need to be resubmitted to the leaderboards, inundating moderators with a flood of submissions that need to be rechecked.

This is assuming speedrunners even have the time to back up all of their content within two months. Users who are no longer active, who no longer stream on Twitch, or who have passed away, will be unable to back up their content and will have large swaths of their videos deleted.

Speedrun communities are already planning their exit strategy from Twitch altogether because of this, as well as instituting blanket Twitch VOD bans for submissions. If this goes forward, entire sections of speedrunning history will be lost forever.