The internet is forever…until it is not. On Wednesday, Twitch announced it would impose new restrictions on archived video highlights and uploads that users can store on their accounts. The new rules, scheduled to take effect on April 19, 2025, will set a 100-hour storage limit on saved videos.
Any account with over 100 hours of content needs to manually delete highlights and uploads, including unpublished content saved to the channel but not publicly accessible – or automatically cleared by content that Twitch will perform. The company said it would remove content “with minimal comments until they are below their limits.”
Twitch said the streaming service is very transparent about money that changes its archive rules: “The content is expensive to store,” Twitch said, saying he believes that cutting savings are highlights and uploads “helps us manage resources more.” Effective…and continue to invest in new features and improvements.”
Only 0.5% of creators on the platform have exceeded the 100-hour storage limit, but that still goes beyond millions of hours of content that will be removed without hesitation, all benefiting the bottom line of Twitch, the company said. . Introducing highlights is a way for creators to choose the most important moments in their own stream and plan the best content.
While Twitch claims the feature is less effective than hoped in driving engagement, Verge notes that the Speedrunning community relies on highlights to save on record runs. The well-known YouTuber Soummoningsalt said on the Blues that Twitch's decision to limit storage marked “a very sad day for Speedrunning.”
Another Speedrunner Mrjimmysteel25 tweeted that for their community, the highlight was never “discovery or engagement” but rather the preservation of history. “People use highlights to archive, and you’re destroying years of speed and other community history.”
Users can download and save their own focus, but this is a local storage issue. And, the fact that Twitch uses this restriction as a means of saving makes it possible to add additional tightening if Twitch needs to juice its bottom line anytime in the future. Throughout the situation, Twitch is owned by Amazon, which operates the world's largest cloud storage platform. This is just another reminder that when you will trust a company historically, it will only retain as much currency as possible.
