The implementation of this was too sudden, and has left so many creators scrambling to preserve their content. 100 hours is far too strict and makes collections basically worthless. Twitch is surrendering ground to other media sites like Youtube with this move, and giving ground to a competitors just to save on resources does not bode well for the health of this platform. This is a bad move both practically and optically.

This seems like a horrible business decision. Do you all not want traffic from people watching vods from peoples streams? Its bad enough the actual vods just disappear after a time. At this point no one will watch twitch unless they can catch it live, and with how aggressive you have been with ads will shrink as well.

I've spent the last several years, highlights spanning all the way back in 2021 to make collections on Twitch available to my community. My storage is close to 3k and this is incredibly devastating...I did not spend all these years highlighting/creating collections only for it to just become obsolete.

Please do not do this.

First, I believe all accounts (especially inactive ones) should have their current highlight hours unaffected (counts as either 0 or actual hours up to limit and anything extra is unaffected/grandfathered in).

Second, the default free hours for users should be 1,000 minimum, with users who need more able to pay a VERY NEGLIGIBLE one-time amount per extra 1,000 hours, with affiliate having lower cost than non-affiliate and partner lower than that.

I personally only use about 20-30 hours/year right now. I’d also much rather have the videos archived on Twitch than YouTube, between the options.

With 1,000 hours, for me to need more means I’m doing well and can afford to expand this as needed, but I regardless don’t want to have to pay perpetually to keep an archive for historical/archival reasons. I however would not mind paying as needed for a higher limit provided that both the free starting point and the future expansion were both reasonably sized (such as 1,000 hours).

The highlight cap is a stupid idea, it will not only get rid of a lot of gaming history but also completely ***** over speedrunners who need to keep their full run accessible at all times for it to be valid on the leaderboards, it also screws over smaller streamers who highlight their vods in a chance that someone stumbles across it and happens to like what they see and ends up following which is something I've personally had happen a few times.

As for the storage cap itself its pointless...

Amazon who owns Twitch makes many billions a month, you sure you can't take a small cut of that just to improve storage space and servers? It seems simple enough to me and many other content creators out there so do us all a favour and do the smart thing before every content creator jumps ship to another platform leaving Twitch a barren wasteland

Twitch, with all due respect this is the worst thing you have done. Not only will you be erasing years of history, but as people have said, this only punishes your most loyal users, erases people who have passed from your site and actively hurts all communities. At least, at least give us like a year to backup everything or even better - don't do it. But if you ABSOLUTELY must introduce a limit how's this:
£100 per year per 1,000 hours
£1,000 per year for 10,000 hours

This way, you get money (we all know you like money) and we get some form of relief from all the stress - which by the way - the stress has made me physically ill, no joke. So please at bare minimum - CONSIDER PAID STORAGE!

Agree entirely.

100 hours of vods... Total.
How about ya use the Glacial storage system of Amazon, and keep things ... Forever?

Words don't describe how angry I am about this whole thing. I shouldn't have to contemplate erasing nearly everything that isn't a speedrun PB, and even THEN I have to cherry pick because 100 hours is such a miniscule amount in the long run and the only reason it's 0.5% of users or whatever is because the overwhelming majority of the average Twitch user either doesn't stream or keep ANYTHING. Even then it's still a big number on account of scale.

There's no reason to bother with the highlight feature with this change, and all it does is punish us for actually using said feature. At the very least, don't disable highlighting and uploading until the April 19th date stated for things to go into effect. As is, many of us don't have two months, we have as little as ONE WEEK to suddenly fix problems. Which is really frustrating and not fun at all when you're scrambling to save thousands of hours of stuff over just 4 years.

If you're dead set on this, at least give us a mass export function that actually freaking works, you utter ghouls.

The speedrunning community is absolutely scrambling right now. Over a decade of history is probably just going to vanish. We're trying as best as we can to archive things but a lot of old runners are retired and so we probably won't be able to get in touch with them in time to save their channels.

100 hours is simply not enough for anyone who even moderately uses the highlights feature, the "0.5%" number is so misleading when that represents tens of thousands of people. I get introducing some kind of limit but that's so absurdly low that it just makes highlighting as a feature pointless.

Would you at least be able to make the Export to Youtube a little more functional? It works fine for videos under 12 hours (the max on Youtube for verified accounts), but if you try exporting a video longer than 12 hours it will fail. For example if the video on Twitch is 12h05m, and you export it to Youtube. You'll end up with a video of the last 5 minutes, and then the 12 hour portion will say "failed to process, file too large".

Right now when you press Export, there is an option to split the video into 15 minute segments, but 15 minutes is the only choice. It would be great if you could set a custom length to split the video into. Like a certain amount of hours. This would make exporting to Youtube and deleting highlights to comply with this new policy much more bearable. Because currently for videos over 12 hours I am unable to export them and downloading them doesn't work so I basically would just have to delete them.

This has been requested by others previously https://twitch.uservoice.com/forums/923368-video-features/suggestions/44065992-add-option-to-split-vod-export-to-youtube-into-12

This place is going to be a ghost town if this goes through. If a streamer can't save their backlog they'll move to YouTube. Then they will stream on YouTube. Classic shortsighted business choices. To say nothing of streamers who are no longer with us. In a year some family member logs on to see their kid playing a game and finds the vods are gone. C'mon, Twitch do better. We like it here.

Yeah, as much as I understand the need to cut costs, this is a very drastic change with not a lot of warning.

Two months is not a lot of time, and not everyone can afford to just download all their Highlights, before we even get into creators who, for one reason or another, don't use the platform anymore and won't be able to back everything up.

I've become very disillusioned by the idea of "Only a very small percentage of our users have gone over this" after Discord reduced their upload limit to 10MB and now I see nothing but people complaining that they can't upload videos anymore. As a result I have a hard time believing such a statistic.

Regardless if it's true or not, people who use the highlight function absolutely rely on it. Limiting it will be removing a core functionality of Twitch.

Are you actively trying to make creators move away from your platform? Is that what you want? 'cause that's what'll happen.

tl;dr Twitch has made some questionable decisions in the past, but this one is completely indefensible.

In addition to the reasons listed in the original post, this change will destroy marathon and event channels like GamesDoneQuick. As you probably know, during AGDQ or SGDQ this is frequently the most viewed stream on the entire platform, going for a week (168 hours+) continuously, in a format where people do watch VODs for runs they were interested in that happened while they were unavailable. The limit also limits the ability to export an event, which will push many events off of Twitch and onto other platforms.

The highlight policy change is a poorly thought out attack on many the most active and dedicated streamers, aimed directly at removing what they've built up over years and years.

And to anyone who might say "it's worth it" or "just archive your stuff elsewhere"? Deleting archives like this would hit people who've passed away and thus can't archive, mass desecrating digital graves.

I remember when collections were pushed out by Twitch as a feature and were told to make the most of it. I was one of them, I have saved most of my past playthroughs in highlight format and then consolidated them into collections after collections for the past eight years. And now, after 6993 hours of content built up, I'm being told I have two months to move them over to any other platform?

I'm just a normal person, so I don't live with a basement full of servers ready to move that much content, and I don't intend to pay a house's worth of rent to store these. Twitch already added towards subscription costs, and increased ad-times over the board, all while taking 50% of all revenue. Yet, they're reducing features? What's the idea really, the Math doesn't quite Math.

First of all, the hundred hour mark is very laughable, it shows how out-of-touch Twitch is with their userbase. I stream 8~13 hours each time and I easily reach that limit within a week. Even at 1000 hours it wouldn't suffice. You would need to increase it marginally or you might as well not give any at all, as people would just move it over to other platforms instead of choosing what to save within a puny 100 hour limit.

Second, the deadline proposed is WAY too near, no one has time to be fully uploading every single day, and the most obvious idea is YouTube, but YouTube has a daily upload limit too so even if we did that utmost we could daily - we wouldn't make it by April 19th if we have more than a few years worth of content. Which is likely not a small number of people.

Third, current broadcasts that're close to being deleted will not make it in time to be moved over if we prioritized chronologically, those should be able to be saved until 19th April, at least, otherwise this is just barbaric and unreasonable.

Please consider rescinding this horrible idea all together, it's senseless. And if it truly doesn't affect that many people, then why even implement this? What good does it do other than upset the amount of people it has already upsetted? (A lot)

And back to my initial point of this post: Why am I being punished for using a feature you guys decided to push out eight years ago?

Storage space is relatively cheap, your company makes billions in profits, there is no reason to require doing this.

Don't go through with this, you're gonna delete so much gaming history..

I think this is a horrible decision. Not only do I use the feature to keep vods for my audience to look back on but also for nostalgia so I can look back at my past.

What happens to all the streamers who are no longer with us, do their content suddenly become lost media? That's an insult to them and their legacy.

This is also a long term problem caused by Twitch's non compete clause for affiliates, most of us didn't bother with YouTube because of the non-compete clauses in the contracts. You created this very environment. An environment built off our backs!

If you are insistent on going ahead with this ludicrous change then quite frankly you've messed up in key areas;
* You've not provided adequate tools for mass migration. You encourage us to move videos to YouTube while requiring us to do it highlight by highlight.

* The content tab is even broken, if you delete content and then change pages content will disappear and then reappear.

* Two months is not enough time for people. If we were given a heads up on this and told "In a year we'll do this" we could gradually start the process and have plenty of time to move it over. Instead you chose two months and even then that comes with a caveat:

* Restricting people already over from making new highlights means anyone over the limit but with vods still to highlight now have a ticking clock that is when their next unhighlighted vod finishes. People should still be able to make vods so they can transfer content over and not lose it.

All this has seriously given me consideration on if Twitch is the environment I want to stream on or if I'd be better suited on a different platform, one that actually respects the time and effort I've put into my content.