TWITCH on what or ANY planet did you think THIS was a good idea -_-

Seriously, 100 hours just too bloody low of a limit in (checks notes) 2025. 1000 hours seems like plenty enough, with the ability to extend it to, mayhaps, 10000 hours.

Either way, this is prolly one of, if not the most absolute, dumbest decision Twitch has ever made.

This 100-hour limit is just straight trash. I've got most of my (2021-current day) streams archived as Highlights - while I have never had a set stream schedule and only had weekly streams for about 3-4 months during that period, I am somehow STILL 60 hours over this proposed limit. If the problem is that Highlights don't get watch time... maybe promote them a little more? Maybe stop tanking them in the search algorithm, and display them properly???

If a limit is necessary for technical reasons, it should be increased substantially from the current proposal. At the bare minimum, 1000 hours.

This is absolutely horrendous man. Been Streaming on Twitch for 4-5 years and all of my playthroughs have been highlighted and stored on here. I genuinely don't understand the thought process behind this decision outside of it being a poor quick method to cut costs that doesn't even in of itself make total sense. Terrible change that I'm really hoping gets reverted.

Just because Twitch automatically knows how much of my content is viewed does not therefore mean it's invaluable. Even the hardly-seen ones are memories of someone, and expressions of one's life...even if it's just simple gameplay. If you're running low on space and are too cheap to get new hard drives, I'm sure you can find a way to save money elsewhere.

This will destroy the viewer and creator experience on Twitch. 100 hours of content is so low for any account - whether active or inactive. History will be erased. If Twitch is to be a real competitor to Youtube, which offers unlimited hours of time for all videos streamed or uploaded, this change must be reversed.

Every single person involved in this decision, from suggesting it to approving it, does not understand how the community of creators uses this website. A devastating decision that will wipe over a decade of history for some people and communities. Not only was the decision itself terrible, but the time period before erasure alone is not near enough for most creators to transfer that amount of content.

You should be leaning more into pushing this archived content to the community, make it more searchable, browsable, and watchable, not driving your creators away -to- those other services.

A horrendous idea. This is devastating to role players, to years and years worth of speedruns, to people’s own personal archives and the ability to share content from Twitch with others. 100 hours is an abysmal amount that I have already breached even with my own vod backups off Twitch. I will be able to reach the limit, but my heart goes out to friends and other fellow streamers for whom this represents an irreversible loss of history. Stop this now.

100 hours is like barely a month's worth of streams. what are you doing.

As an affiliate who already paid for twitch turbo for extended vod time (both for the vods to stay up AND so give myself time to turn them into highlights), and have turned my vods into highlights so that entire playthroughs and special events can be viewed on site, I find this extremely disheartening.

The fact Twitch hates vods and never gives us the ability to promote them is already hard, but this will just be a slap in the face to anyone trying to archive their work on site.

Twitch needs to re-evaluate. It should be optimizing the process and expanding its use, not limiting it further.

As others have noted, this change would be a devastating blow to the history of speedrunning. It is simply not possible to archive that history in the given window, particularly for users who have retired or passed away.

The quoted metrics for this change seem suspect: The simple fact that anyone with more than 5 concurrent viewers is in the top 1% of streamers (if not a smaller subset) suggests that the 0.5% of "active streamers" this impacts is a much more significant portion of Twitch's userbase than they are trying to represent.

Discoverability has always been an issue on Twitch, but removing features that may allow a user to be discovered *on platform* seems ridiculous. Why is Twitch pushing its users anywhere and everywhere else?

Simply this change should not be done, but if this change must be done, make it so existing highlights will not be counted in this minuscule time limit so we don't lose so much history.

This is a "stop streaming on Twitch immediately and never come back" moment for me. I have been streaming on Twitch since 2016. I put thought and care into my streams and they aren't intended as transient content. If Twitch did not offer the ability to save durable VODs of my streams I would not have been streaming there in the first place— I would have sought some alternative service from the beginning. Now not only is Twitch saying that VODs are not welcome here, it is giving me two months (two months!) to rehost my last ten years of content (316 hours— not really so much for ten years, but too much for Twitch). I don't understand how I am going to meet that deadline.

You are going about this in the worst possible way. You could have said "okay, we'll host the existing content, but no more than 50 hours more from your current amount", to prevent speedrun.com from becoming an archive of dead links. You didn't do this. You could have added features for us to download/YouTube-migrate videos in bulk instead of requiring individually clicking on each one (a thing I cannot realistically do with my video count, I have RSI) before introducing this change. You didn't. You didn't even offer us the ability to pay for additional storage (don't you own AWS? aren't you the pay-for-storage *company*?).

Springing "well, you've been giving us content for ten years for free, but now you have to pay *us* or we delete it" would have been a mean thing to do. But saying "you couldn't even *pay* us to host your video archive" is just saying Twitch doesn't want me as a customer [which is to say: provider of free content that Twitch runs ads on]. My next stream is on Mar 1 and for the first time I will be streaming on YouTube.

Twitch is literally toying with the idea of erasing over a decade of history from their platform, this is extraordinarily shortsighted on their part and, if we're being honest, only serves to make streaming on YouTube a more appealing option.

This makes no sense from the viewer or streamer perspective. There's a chance that doesn't matter at all, since this is clearly just cost-cutting, but why not just charge users that are using too much storage instead of forcing hundreds of hours of work?

And why would you do this change without notice? The two month time limit means nothing if you're already over the 100 hours, which...is extremely low given how long streamers have been streaming and using this feature.

This is devastating and making me want to leave the platform entirely.

Hey, how about we don't implement more horrible ideas as cost cutting measures as opposed to I don't know, maybe telling Dan to stop wasting millions of dollars on stupid things no one but himself wants.

+1, this would destroy a lot of what makes twitch special

If I mail you guys a 10TB storage drive, can I just keep doing what I'm doing? Storage is dirt cheap. My meager Affiliate revenue should pay for my VOD storage. My Turbo sub should pay for my VOD storage. Why don't they?

As a regular Twitch streamer, I have been using VOD uploads for years. They've been very helpful for archiving & documenting my playthroughs, art timelapses, and more. It's also vital for backup purposes, as I like to try to keep at least two backups of things. (If one goes down, another can be managed accordingly - but if I have no way to find a new second, what am I going to do...?)

Twitch's upload feature actually has a lot more usage than it might seem from a glance. I've seen mine actually get actively viewed by VOD watchers - visibility limited only by Twitch's own webpage design.

The feature has a lot of potential to be expanded on as well, for both users' and Twitch's benefit. YouTube has chapter info to mark spots in VODs. I hate to bring this one up, but Twitch could even monetize them with advertising (preferably in a non-intrusive way - unlike the common practice with stream midrolls). Twitch having uploads as a feature makes for a good competitor to YouTube - and if YouTube also becomes unusable, I don't know what else I'll do to secure my archive.

The mention of 0.5% of users using uploads comes off as cherry-picked. I'm among the ones who regularly produce content on the site - alongside a large number of other professional streamers that I've come to know well. From my experience, uploads are valuable and useful, so this trivialization doesn't send the message that Twitch thinks that it does.

The claim that less than 0.1% of watch time is from uploads also feels somewhat manipulated. Uploads aren't given as much visibility as the front-and-center livestreams - but that doesn't mean that people who do know the feature don't take time to watch VODs as well. In other words, the low statistics merely reflect a feature regularly used by professionals that has been relatively buried by Twitch's own designs.

Combined with the relatively very short notice (note that established streamers have streamed for years, not just months), it's not only an out-of-touch decision, but a poor business decision that seems meant simply to save some short-term money. I would understand the decision more had it been an actual necessity for better reasons, but as is, I would propose some other solutions to approaching issues:

1) In this case, give more, not less, to the upload feature.
2) In general, it's good practice to discuss changes with the communities affected. We should be able to actually participate in the solution, rather than feeling like a second priority. Having conversation about the issue and our options makes people happier and more productive in the long term.
- (A good example to reference is how much Twitter has been degrading. A series of out-of-touch decisions made the platform increasingly unusable and hostile. It eventually lost me to Bluesky when it kept aggressively pushing genAI, among many other issues there - all of which had failed to consider the communities using the platform.)

There are a good number of streamers who rely on Twitch for income, and uploads are very much a part of their viewership.

I don't plan to immediately start taking down VODs, as I'd like to give Twitch an opportunity to respond to this. I certainly hope that they do, in which case: Thank you for taking time to read our comments, although we do need a more favorable solution.

~ Auburn Arcana

I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to limit highlights and uploads. Some people do charity events and other cool things that deserve to be celebrated and highlighted, and it’s really messed up to make twitch users decide which of their highlights are worthy of keeping. This is such a terrible idea.

Frankly the limit is so incredibly small. Assuming the average stream is about 4 hours then that's only 25 streams that can be saved. Even if you only stream once a week that's less than half a year of streams.