If less than 0.5% of users upload over 100hrs, then either this is an extreme penny pinching move, or some few in that 0.5% upload a massive overage of content.
This is the standard outcome for any type of hosting service that starts out with low/no limitations. The vast majority of the users use it in a way that's sustainable for both parties, and then there's a small subset of users who abuse the system to such an extent that it becomes financially infeasible. Nearly every free hosting service in history has jumped through these hoops at one point.
It's the latter. Some people abuse the system by highlighting the full length of every broadcast, turning their highlights section into a complete archive of their streams, which is not something Twitch ever wanted to offer.
I don't think it's fair to say twitch "never wanted to offer" when not long ago, that behavior was the base functionality. You could rewatch everyone's entire streams forever. There was a DMCA scare at some point when streamers were getting in trouble for their old streams having music and many took down all of their history, but before then you'd see years worth of streams for people
I did that, but not as a way to abuse the system. I used to export all my streams to YouTube directly from Twitch without downloading it first. I would just trim the beginning of the stream and sometimes split in more than one video if I had multiple content in one stream. I have hundreds of videos starting from 2018. I just thought this was ok and now I'm going through the effort of exporting them individually to a youtube account. I wish they had offered at least a way to export or download them in batch.
>Asking ChatGPT
That alone makes me want to discard your entire argument, but the answer is pretty simple: cost
Hosting huge amounts of video data throughout multiple data centers is just plain expensive.
Some ads isn't gonna fix that, especially since twitch already has a frustrating amount of ads everywhere.
Every time anyone posts anything from ChatGPT, it gets immediately and massively downvoted. It’s clear the community doesn’t want this; please don’t post it!
I guess it’s the latter. If you can afford, give your users a generous offer, but never unlimited. Otherwise, some people will find very creative ways to abuse it.
That's assuming none of that video is something that Twitch is storing for any other reason (i.e., other users have highlights of the same thing, or they would store the videos internally for some reason).
It's possible the actual additional storage requirements for that specific user are minuscule, since we don't know what data they are/aren't archiving themselves, if they're doing any deduplicating, etc.
yeah, kinda, but VODs (the automatic recordings) are not covered by this change. This is about edits & uploads, so stuff you would usually put on youtube. If you're a full time streamer and stream every day, Twitch will still provide your past streams for 2 (or 3? not sure) months (or less if you're not popular) and this will not change anything for you.
That's the cost for just buying disks, but storing data in the cloud costs more than that and it's an ongoing cost.
S3 charges 1.25c/GB/month for this sort of data. So that's $200/month for just this guy. There may be 100s or thousands of these people. Easily adds up.
> That's the cost for just buying disks, but storing data in the cloud costs more than that and it's an ongoing cost.
> S3 charges 1.25c/GB/month for this sort of data.
It doesn't cost them anywhere close that. Their competitors charge twice as less or more an still make money.
Twitch belongs to Amazon, they are the cloud.
Setting up your own infra to handle this is of course going to cost you a lot more than that, but when you have the infra set up then the marginal price is hardware (+ a monthly electricity bill, which is not as high as for other kind of workload).
And even if they had to charge $200 a month, they should probably offer the option instead of just removing the content: we're talking about professionals who make money out of the platform (and earn Twitch their income), they can make the choice whether or not they can afford it.
> And even if they had to charge $200 a month, they should probably offer the option instead of just removing the content: we're talking about professionals who make money out of the platform
There's no way these professionals have 6000 hours of interesting content and there's no way they would pay $200/month to store it. They're just saving everything they ever record because it's free.
Implementing that feature would cost more money than it would ever make.
> There's no way these professionals have 6000 hours of interesting content and there's no way they would pay $200/month to store it. They're just saving everything they ever record because it's free.
Some of these people have been streaming for 15 years, it's far from “everything they ever record” (and some content creators in twitter/bluesky links elsewhere in this discussion explicitly said they did select content).
Likely they would be more picky in their selection if they had to pay, but that doesn't mean they would be ready to pay something for a thousand hours instead of 100. 100 hours is a ridiculous amount!
> Implementing that feature would cost more money than it would ever make.
It's no more work than implementing a hard threshold. They did change the system in the first place, they could have made this change much better had they cared…
I don't think you've thought this through. You can't _just_ bill the owner a couple of bucks each month. You need a whole infrastructure to do that. You need to plan, design, build, test, deploy, maintain, and provide customer service for an entire new feature of your site. You need to research, test, revise and communicate what the price for storage is going to be (and handle the immediate and ongoing backlash). You need to catrgorize and plan for this new income stream AS WELL AS the costs to get it started and the ongoing costs to maintain it.
That's all just off the top of my head, and all of that is going to be fighting against all the other projects that people want to get done, projects that are likely way more profitable and way closer to the primary goal of the company -- being an intentional streaming service, not an accidental video hosting service.
Pardon, not the storage infrastructure, but the tracking, billing, taxation, customer support, etc. infrastructure.
It's a whole new income stream, which becomes a whole new line of business, and that business requires a variety of infrastructure to support it, especially at a large company.
6Mbps is Twitches recommended ingest bitrate, and their highest quality just serves the ingested stream back to viewers without transcoding. In reality the storage would actually be a little higher still because they have to store all the transcoded lower resolution versions as well.
It's a trade-off between bandwidth and encoding capacity. Twitch actually only guarentees transcoding for "partnered" streamers above a certain viewership threshold, so when watching a smaller streamer you might only be able to view the "source" quality if there isn't enough encoding capacity to go around.
That’s kind of the main consideration with production LLM apps right now. Really looking for a startup that solves this out of the box (llm credit payment system that manages the reality that remote LLM usage can never be unlimited).
Twitch will offer a premium sub for heavy users most likely.
