Vimeo banned video game content in 2008. Users migrated to other sites that were soon worth far more than Vimeo.
Focusing on video game material instead of being neutral and coming up with a reasonable business model that makes sense for all your customers (then communicating it up front) is the problem. There's always going to be a subset of customers that pushes the envelope. This conflicts with short term growth strategies but perhaps there's a little room for ethics to sneak in.
> Focusing on video game material instead of being neutral and coming up with a reasonable business model that makes sense for all your customers (then communicating it up front) is the problem. There's always going to be a subset of customers that pushes the envelope.
Are you implying that the videos getting hit by this are not generally video game content?
I don't think that's right. In particular there's a lot of speedrun recordings that are going to disappear when this day hits.
(The HN title had to cut some of the explanation for brevity, probably 99% of what is going to get deleted is long highlights, not uploads.)
Not the point of my original post, but Vimeo is famous for layoffs and firing expensive customers, too. In March 2022 they told some users that their channels would now cost thousands of dollars a month.
Are there any numbers on YouTube?
While I don't doubt their costs are orders of magnitude bigger that other services, they also operate at a different scale operate as a defacto music service (I'm not talking about YT Music), and have the largest pool of ads to serve
YouTube profits aren't broken out separately. However, Google's quarterly and annual reports do give Youtube Ad revenues, which were $36bn in fiscal 2024. That Youtube is not profitable is quite the strong claim.....
Technically nothing what you said disputes the claim.
You're jumping to the assumption that surely YouTube's costs have to be lower than $36B, and that is not at all assured. They handle an absolutely gargantuan amount of network data transfer, not to mention processing compute. I'm ignoring the storage but even that at their scale is probably at least 1B.
In addition to the loss leader aspect it has for their other business units, what about more traditional expenses? Directly serving ads aside, all the user behavioral and popular trend data has to be hugely valuable in its own right. Plus all that ML training data would have cost them something if they hadn't already had it sitting on their servers.
It seems like you just have to be sufficiently large before you can successfully monetize a video platform.
I guess it makes sense. I remember once upon a time that Twitch saved every broadcast, in full, forever. That sounds kind of ridiculous these days, but then again YouTube does still does that for everyone’s streams and makes it work. Are there very different economies of scale at work here or are Google just willing to pay the extra money?
However unlike Twitch, Youtube doesn't save recordings of livestreams over 12 hours. Which means that subathons (a format where viewers extend the duration of the stream by donating money) don't get recorded on Youtube.
The post says this rule doesn't apply to past broadcasts. Presumably that means the rule only applies to uploaded videos. Which I did not even realize was a feature, and I've been an avid watcher and occasional broadcaster since the justin days.
Edit: others have explained elsewhere VODs are auto deleted after 60 days, and then must be converted to highlights, which will be affected. I think anyone who relies on Twitch VODs as a viewer or producer is a glutton for punishment anyway. The viewing experience is dreadful if I remember correctly, enough so I just wait for a YouTube upload anyway.
In my anecdotal experience, I have probably watched several thousands of hours of live content over the last decade-plus, and maybe a half dozen VODs.
Twitch VODs aren't really any worse than any other way to watch video? I'll regularly use them when I see some stream I'm interested in while I'm busy with something else, or if I jump into something halfway and want to go back and watch the beginning.
It's interesting what this situation would be like if HDD capacity hadn't stopped its exponential growth in 2010: https://imgur.com/a/lWdcjX7
We would be at a penny per terabyte of space. If AV1 in HD can store 400 hours of video per TB, the roughly 24TB to store a 24/7 stream over the course of a year would cost only 25 cents. Providers could keep all video content indefinitely.
Perhaps there's some benefit to this exponential growth coming to an end. Imagine a surveillance state that had near limitless storage and could keep 24/7 recordings indefinitely of cameras on every street, house, vehicle, etc.
Low quality video mixed with some key snapshots and full audio would only be about half a terabyte per year. So even with current pricing, a surveillance state can easily pay $3-10 dollars to store that if it wants to.
twitch is nowhere near the size of youtube even if streams are usually longer than videos. they also have probably not even 1% of the channel amount and at this point there are more streamer on youtube than twitch. if youtube (google) can, then twitch (amazon) should too.
The big problem with this move is that it doesn't give people enough time to migrate, and they can't make new highlights while they struggle to download upwards of 3000 hours (in the multiple terabytes) of old video, at the same time as hundreds or thousands of other partners doing the same thing.
This affects far more people at a much higher scale than Twitch will admit, and the deadline given isn't enough for these data transfers to complete.
There are playthroughs of single games that are more than 100 hours. Even if you're only playing "short" games, you're looking at 6-10 hours, which means you only give your audience a library of 10-15 vods? Average games are 20-40, so 5?
Vod viewing on twitch is also a pain, ads every 10 minutes, buggy playback, and vods don't play in order.
What's going to happen is anyone currently storing their playthroughs on twitch is now going to export to youtube. So I guess they want youtube to get the ad rev.
It'll just make also streaming to YouTube (or other services) simultaneously more attractive. Apparently Twitch has exclusivity agreements with some people, but it's already pretty common to do this.
Are there really 5+ day nonstop playthroughs? Are there just hours of no content while the streamer eats/sleeps? Why wouldn't that be split into multiple parts by the streamer, as a natural consequence of how it was recorded?
As pointed out elsewhere, past broadcasts/VODs had an autodelete horizon added years ago, so after a certain point, you'd have to reupload your content if you wanted it archived in perpetuity.
One might imagine this is just the logical followup of them adding that horizon initially, basically saying "the 1 in 200 of you who circumvented our policy, no, for real, stop that."
There have been streamers doing subathons of 30+ days. They usually eat while doing something else/watching something they will comment later, while they sleep there is either no content or some friends/moderators talk to the viewers.
And it might make sense, if the way youtube stores the video is more efficient. Ultimately live streaming/simulcasting are different that cold video. See how Netflix, having no problems doing efficient movie serving, doesn't do quite so great at providing a good experience in live events. And I'd bet that the storage model for youtube and Netflix is already quite different, as the number of total videos, and the distribution of who watches what, when and where, is quite different.
It doesn't even have to be more efficient, necessarily, just valuable enough to be more worthwhile.
In this case, they seem to be saying long-form archives aren't helping their business and are very expensive.
Of course, since that also de facto means people start pointing to their YouTube pages as their content archives, that means they think they have such a better platform for live content that they can survive people doing the calculus of "well, if I have to host my old content on YT anyway, why am I using Twitch if I'm just going to upload to YT after..."
Whether that's true or not, we'll see. (One might argue this is a given comparing the number of people I know who stream on Twitch versus YT, but Twitch is also the place that thought people wanted them to integrate a game store in their desktop app, and appears to have the attention span of a squirrel in long-term platform initiatives, so...we'll see.)
(I work for Google, I've never worked on anything related to YouTube, opinions my own.)
I would prefer views, to be honest. For example if some arbitrary content is stored for 2 months without anyone ever watching it, that feels reasonable for me to remove it, no one is watching it. Some video that is actually serving a purpose being culled just because of the arbitrary hour limit feels to me, a less reasonable stance.
In practice though I doubt this makes a huge difference either way, the vast majority of the people that can have noticeable amount of views on such already have their YouTube channels or other venues they are also making money from.
Twitch only stores Past Broadcasts for 2 months before they're automatically deleted. If you want to keep them past the 2 months, you have to convert them into Highlights, which are affected.
So yes, this will absolutely affect the speedrunning community, and anyone else who has been using this method to archive old streams.
I was under the impression that the principal objective of speed running was to get things done quickly. You should be able to fit a lot of valuable information within the quota if you are any good at it.
This comes from a misunderstanding of what speedrunning is.
It's not merely doing something quickly; it's more akin to a sport.
The objective of speedrunning is to perform something you would do in a game in a record time, or it's now been somewhat expanded to sometimes include or mean some extraordinary feat in a game that may not be directly related to speed.
A speedrun of a game might mean to complete a game that would normally take months in (for example) "only 10 hours", in which case the speedrunner needs to be live for those ten hours. A recording is not an acceptable substitute due to issues of cheating[1].
Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.
[1] It's still possible to cheat live, but it's more complicated, more challenging, and there's a greater likelihood of being caught.
> Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.
I am still not following why Twitch needs to maintain live copies of all the failed runs. Once you hit the objective, make that video the highlight or whatever to be persisted indefinitely.
Why would anyone care about watching several hours of something when they know ahead of time it's not going to be representative of a successful outcome? Iteration #17 out of hundreds can't possibly be valuable enough to justify the storage cost in even the most charitable of cases. It seems to me that most of speed running could be done completely offline without involving the internet and video capture technology (i.e., practicing a musical instrument).
Speedrunning in terms of archiving the completed run for future reference as the Thing To Beat, sure.
But part of the reason this has become such a popular thing is the community aspect of it - people get drawn in and inspired to participate because they get engaged in the community of either particular runners or the wider community of people who follow all the runners of some games.
At least for me, while I've never had the desire to participate, when I was sick for a year or so, and therefore at home with little ability to participate in a lot of other things, I went down the rabbit hole of watching different runs of different games, and one of the more useful tools and timesinks was being able to watch the past broadcasts of different runners and seeing if they were enjoyable to watch, at the particular game whose speedruns were interesting me at the moment.
And since not everyone just runs one or two things, sometimes their last runs of those games were months in the past.
So at least in my n=1 experience, those broadcast archives specifically were quite useful for me as a viewer and person attempting to discover more streamers to watch.
Watching the speedrunner improve, watching them discover new techniques, the discussion they have with their audience, etc. Speedrunning, ironically, is not just about the destination: it's about the (often public!) journey the speedrunner took to get there.
As the others have said, it's about the journey, so let me expand on this a bit.
Streaming games has a large social component, whether it's speedrunning, or just casual play. It's often as much about the personality of the player as it is about the game. People watch as a communal activity.
- Why is it so long?
In this game, items evolve over time. There is an item, the Shampoo, that takes literally 2 weeks (= 336 hours) to evolve into Splendid Hair.
Not really. That's like saying a wrestler is only in the match for a few minutes so why do they need all of that training.
Speedrunners are often playing the game or parts of the game hundreds of times. And they're usually performing techniques that take lots of precision and therefore lots of practice.
So they stream it all, documenting their attempts and trying new strategies in front of a live audience. They produce so much comment that there are YouTube channels that make documentaries about different speedrunners.
Speedrunning is mostly cheaters using combinations of emulation, save states, etc. I don't think speedrunners actually speedrun on unmodified consoles in one go at all these days. Of course back in the day anything other than playing on a console attached to a TV would have been considered cheating and gotten you thrown out of the community.
Also virtual environment creation, agent training, etc. For any given game you can create a small dataset of recordings of both player inputs and gameplay footage, use that to create a model that can derive inputs from looking at footage, and then create input sequences for your huge backlog of gameplay footage. From there you can use the backlog to train AI that either recreates realistic player actions from screen inputs, or AI that recreates the entire game (like the AI minecraft)
Not to mention the huge amount of voice samples and webcam footage you could use for more typical voice cloning, text to speech, human avatar creation, etc
Normal VODs already automatically "expire" (i.e., are automatically deleted) after a certain time. IIRC the time limit is between 7 and 60 days depending on your account type (e.g. whether you're a Twitch partner, whether you have Twitch Prime, etc.).
Making a VOD a highlight was a way around that -- Twitch would never delete those.
>Making a VOD a highlight was a way around that -- Twitch would never delete those.
I'm not disagreeing that it was common knowledge that this was a way for non-partners to circumvent the regular retention policies, which is why this 100-hour limit seems like a pretty generous compromise.
Clicking through random channels just now, I didn't see a single account with any Uploads, and most of the channels who had any content in Highlights seemed to use it pretty sparingly (<100 hours). It doesn't seem like a common practice, and Twitch doesn't seem like it's trying to eradicate history, just reign in some behavior that the platform didn't intend to support.
If you're aware of certain communities who've made a practice of highlighting their entire streams (beyond 100 hours) without being partnered, maybe you could promote them here so people could help archive them?
I remember when Twitch implemented the VOD expiration with the "highlight" system; the discourse at the time was that some people enabled VOD retention and then forgot about it, uselessly clogging the servers. So if you really cared about retaining VODs, you just had to highlight them. I think they just counted on no one caring enough, since highlighting every single VOD is a pain.
It turns out that most people who cared enough about retaining VODs just upload them to Youtube. Youtube is simply a better viewing experience for non-live videos, and it can generate some revenue (though usually very small, unless you have a huge amount of views). One problem with Youtube is that it's more strict about (what it thinks is) copyright content -- for example, some otherwise "free"[1] videogame music is regularly claimed by on Youtube by someone who sampled the original song, so it registers as someone else's content to Youtube's content ID.
[1] By "free" I mean that original videogame music is not usually actively protected (even though it's under copyright), because publishers love when people promote their games.
Well, the settings page on Twitch has this help text on the "store past broadcasts" toggle:
Automatically save broadcasts for up to 7 days (14 days for Affiliates, 60 days for Partners, Turbo and Prime users)
Maybe the video you're seeing is a highlight? Either way, I can't see it because I don't subscribe to Khaldor (I used to love watching his Starcraft 2 casts back in the day, though).
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.
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.
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.
In one of my thought experiments I was thinking would only audio livestreaming be viable social platform for content creators because audio is like 90% smaller in size and therefore you don't need to spend loads of money to setup and maintain audio livestreaming infrastructure.
Btw, I think there is an easy option to export your Twitch content to YouTube so that's another way of saving all the content.
YouTube has tons of videos saved, doesn't it? The key difference between YouTube and Twitch is profitability. Twitch has never been profitable, and although Amazon has given them free rein until now, they're likely facing pressure to start making money.
So online radio stations? I think its been tried a lot, for decades, and while I don't listen often it is not never. I think people gravitate towards spotify "radio" without anyone talking or podcasts for this use case though.
Yes online radio station plus social features like Twitch and even Twitch streamers could restream their live audio to this new audio platform.
When you think about social audio, who is number one? Spotify is music subscription service and it's not really YouTube for audio meant for content creators and SoundCloud is stuck in time and it never really took off.
I would like to see SoundCloud reimagined with new features and ideas.
I'm not sure, maybe you have something there but I believe that if people are as engaged as you describe for social features to make sense, commenting and stuff, they want to see the person as well. We are very visual.
Clubhouse was or still is live audio chat room for people, it's not full fledged audio livestreaming platform. Although like vasco said most of the people prefer visual content so idk how popular would be only audio livestreaming platform.
What I don’t get is how YouTube does this. I have all sorts of videos there for archival with very few views and they just keep them? I couldn’t blame them if they deleted the videos though I’d prefer to have some warning. This is a large amount of space for essentially socially useless junk.
Not everything is worth archiving for all eternity. Do we really need a 300 hour Final Fantasy 7 playthrough with 3 viewers archived for all eternity like it’s the Magna Carta
But that's missing the point of what archiving content on the Internet tends to be mostly about: you cannot possibly go through all of it and decide what's worth archiving, so you archive it all by default. Then, you can skim through it or remove whatever you choose to.
There is this story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski and how film saved the photo, but this feels like a 1996 problem. In 2006, disk space was cheap enough to save all the photos.
The competitor already exists and at least some people are already using it: PeerTube.
Run it yourself, and you can save whatever videos your community cares about for as long as you fucking feel like because YOU OWN IT. None of YouTube's asinine copyright strike bullshit to worry about -- if a company has a problem with your use of something they need to send you a real DMCA notice. None of Twitch's random policy change bullshit to worry about. No advertising. If your community actually gives a shit about the content then they will pitch in to pay for the hosting through Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi, etc -- or mirror it themselves. Any streamer with a decent number of viewers will almost certainly have someone in the audience who is technically capable of running an instance if the streamer can't or doesn't want to DIY.
I get being on YouTube and Twitch -- PeerTube's discoverability sucks -- but for goodness sake, take ownership of your archives! If you make videos, that is your long tail! That is your legacy! Own it!
the problem to build a competitor is the community, not the technical part. If one (or a handful of) streamer move elsewhere, most of the viewers won't follow him
Of course. But we've seen it happen before. Digg had a huge lead on Reddit, angered the community enough that they left. Myspace v Facebook. Etc.
I don't use Twitch deeply so I'm not sure if this is a big enough thing to make people switch in large numbers, but if it is, the tech stack just doesn't seem like a moat at all these days. If anything, I'd say the fact that they prune old content already sort of is the opposite. YouTube's deep content library makes it hard to compete with them. Twitch purposefully doesn't even have one.
A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS bill became significant.
Yea, but, in addition, Twitch has a very expensive business to run. Video is orders of magnitude more data than pictures and audio which are itself magnitudes above text. The costs in your example are wildly different.
And the culture. Your examples are from the 2000s. The culture of the Internet back then was vastly different than it is today.
> A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS bill became significant.
I disagree. Where is this magic funds button? You're gonna need quite the pitch to get an investor to invest LOTS of money going up against Amazon (edit: and Google!).
I have no idea, but I'd assume the opposite. Twitch partners seem to make up the vast majority of streams from what I've seen. I you take any game and scroll down, there are so many people with 0 to 2 viewers (probably another open tab or a friend) that are generating video that would be stored, but not generating revenue unlike something like a large video game tournament.
I'd guess it's something like 99% of content is seldom, if ever viewed, but I have no clue.
As for videos over 100 hours, it may be mostly top streamers.
The thing I don't understand about this, why not simply charge the creator for it? I know we live in the age of rent extracting (as per Varoufakis: feudal) internet platforms but markets do actually work. Creators should be customers of a platform like Twitch and pay for services provided and this ceases to be a problem.
If there's value in the VODs for content creators charge them for storage to at least break even, for VODs that don't get any views creators will have an incentive to delete them if they have to pay, problem solved. There's no need for arbitrary 100 hour limits or only targeting x% of creators, just use good old price signals.
I don't use Twitch much, but, based on what other users have said, I think highlights was the only part not already subjected to automatic deletion after 60 days.
So I think the reaction is because there's no now way to keep over 100 hours of video long term on Twitch?
Focusing on video game material instead of being neutral and coming up with a reasonable business model that makes sense for all your customers (then communicating it up front) is the problem. There's always going to be a subset of customers that pushes the envelope. This conflicts with short term growth strategies but perhaps there's a little room for ethics to sneak in.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/vimeo-bans-v...
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