The claim that we have until April 19th is disingenuous. You have already begun enforcing a 100-hour limit to Highlight storage. A huge population of streamers have VODs that expire 7 days after broadcast, and will have to spend unplanned time culling their library to meet the limit if they want to save anything from recent streams. There are probably some whose VODs were set to expire who had no opportunity whatsoever to get under the threshold in time to be allowed to make a highlight. The policy is bad. The execution is far worse.

This is yet another bad idea implemented to make only the C-suite happy. Effectively removing an incredibly useful feature of the site to save what amounts to a drop in the ocean. Nobody wants this change.

Another situation where Twitch removes a useful (and despite what they say) popular feature and tries to spin it like its doing everyone a favor. Really? It’s pathetic. 100 hour is literally nothing. The last full playthrough of a game I have saved on my channel as highlights was just over 200 hours. So you’re telling my that I’ll no longer to keep a full playthrough of anything saved on your glorious platform. Nice.

I’ll be starting my 6th year on Twitch shortly and have over 2600 hours of all my playthgroughs, complete with chat history here. And you’re just going to take it away without even having the decency to offer me the option to keep any of it beyond 100 hours. Really pathetic. I’d gladly give up a percentage of my monthly payout to go towards hosting costs to keep my highlights and collections intact. But you can’t even be bothered to offer that, just going to nuke everything.

If Twitch isn’t making enough money for Jeff to cover hosting costs maybe he should just sell it to someone who actually cares about the users. But I know hosting is hard. If only there was some huge coproration that you could aquire cloud storage from...

Years of gaming history from thousands of people is just going to be wiped out. Bravo! Can’t wait until your next attempt to shoot yourself in the foot.

That is really sad to see that news. I like a lot of authors with the big library of uploads and highlights, and as viewer I do not want them to lose this content because of this sudden decision. There is a lot of users that watch this videos. I guess Twitch and Amazon have other better ways to solve this problem. But not like that please:)

It is unethical for Twitch/Amazon to implement this change with no support provided to the creators whose work Twitch monetizes and profits from. Regardless of the timeline and the limit, Twitch should not be able to require this change without streamlined, user friendly tools in place to enable content creators to bulk download or otherwise preserve their work locally for uploading to other platforms if they so choose. Twitch has essentially forced unpaid work onto creators, externalizing their costs.

to those that may be suggesting that it should be 1,000 hours or even 10,000 hours. that's still not enough for some[i've seen some have over 11k-12k]. it should be more like 25,000 hours. ****, why stop there? it should be either 25,000 hours or 10tb[depending on whichever number is being exceeded]. the honest fact of the matter is that this cap being time length based and not storage based is dumb. at this rate, i'm willing to call twitch's bluff to see if they eventually end up walking this back with how much blowback there's being.

bumping something i heard someone on bsky say that i got a hoot out of: if only 0.5% use this, surely twitch can just afford to pay it off if it's so little people?? why risk making them go to youtube, your competitor, over what you guys seem to think is a small, negligible amount of people? it's just 0.5%. a small amount. what gives?

i think they realize 0.5% is a lot. they're just BS'ing twitch users so they can penny pinch. despicable.

either 0.5% is a lot and they're being dishonest, or it's a little and they're making a big deal out of nothing just so they can save a bit of money at the expense of creators. either way, they're really showing themselves with this decision

literally there were so many more ways to go about this, but they chose the worst way to go about it that literally *only* benefits twitch. -_- if they were so pressed for cash (which i doubt, but for argument's sake) they could've just made it into a subscription. but they *still* didn't do that. why?

Leave an unlimited amount of time for highlights or set a fixed amount in the region of 5000-10000 hours, but for a subscription, since many authors simply do not have enough time to process all the material themselves and squeezing it into 100 hours is absurd, and since many get the opportunity to develop more widely, people will agree to pay a conditional $ 10 so that their content can be stored much longer on the site they love. And this is also one of the ways to promote, do not ruin the service!

This is absurd. I'm willing to pay for any subscription, but only to get around the **** 100-hour limit. The newcomers who came to twitch haven't even had time to create so much content yet, and they have a lot of interesting things ahead of them, but what about the representatives of the old school? Delete everything that could become a story and raise the channel to the top? It's a disgusting decision. I avoided twitch for many years because none of the authors could give me a 100% chance to save every broadcast, when I found a solution to this, I came to try myself, and now I see that I am not welcome here. Why waste hours of your life working here if it's all going to sink into oblivion or be migrated to another platform. It will be easier for authors who value their work and content in general to switch to other sites.

This is a beyond absurd decision. Twitch's own channel has highlights from years ago that well past exceed this limit and many other channels I follow do as well, earlier today I was looking through them to see what would be lost and to basically say oh no one really watches them and we're no longer gonna allow what many people do actually use twitch for which is saving these moments that are special and meaningful whether that's playthroughs , awesome community moments , charity marathons , speedruns the list goes on and on. Yes twitch is a live streaming platform for live content but its more then that to so many people. We all know that not everyone is gonna be around for those moments which why highlights and uploads , collections all of it is so important so they can be apart of it. Anything else more that could be said would just be echoing the sentiments of what other people are saying about not following through with this change which we implore you not to.

another boneheaded decision from people who don't understand the culture of the site. you guys are literally amazon, you have the means to keep everything into perpetuity.

When Twitch calculated the percentage"0.5%", they probably used only the number of “accounts that have ever streamed” as the population.
If accounts that have never streamed were included, it is not surprising that the percentage would be this high, and I think the intent was to make the numbers appear small and to cover up the magnitude of the impact.

100 hours is not enough. And Digest archives should not be included in the restrictions. The digest is an important record of streaming.

This decision is expected to make it more difficult for streamers to stream on Twitch. If cost is an issue, it is necessary to secure a means to preserve further archives through paid options.

If costs are an issue, streamers and viewers alike deserve to have a seat at the table and see the data themselves before resorting to drastic measures like these. As many others have mentioned, this has very negative impacts on major cornerstones of livestreamed gaming such as fighting games and speedruns. If Twitch is unable or unwilling to preserve Highlighted VODs and their associated chat messages, then core communities like these that helped make Twitch what it is today will be gravely affected by having their history eroded even if they are able to archive the video portion of this data elsewhere.

I personally don't save my vods/highlights. But occasionally, I like to see the history of someone else. To be able to look back in time at why an inside joke exists. Or watch something memorable from someone.

The speedrunning is a big deal. Content for retired streamers is a big deal. And even moreso, from those who may have passed away.

- If it really is "only effecting .5% of streamers"....why does that miniscule amount of people have such a tremendous impact on storage that they have to delete them?
- For people who have been streaming 2, 5, 10 years - how come they aren't getting hours allotted per year instead of a flat tiny amount?

100 hours or 1000 hours, don't do this Twitch.

~4 days seems like a ridiculously tiny number in terms of highlight time. I barely even started streaming and only saved a fraction of that time and i'm still at the limit. I can't even imagine the amount of hours some of the more dedicated channels may have. If twitch can tie vod deletion to your status and prime subscription, why not this?

Probably the most egregious of this is that speedrun history is stored entirely in highlights. 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. Crippling the highlights feature is going to be an unmitigated disaster for speedrun history.

Awful, 100 hours is nothing, you might as well delete the highlight function