Games

The people complaining about this in the article are largely hysterical and delusional.

Perfect embodiment of 'always online' brain.

They genuinely believe Twitch is some kind of public good, some kind of default level of infrastructure like plumbing, that just works, forever, with no problems, because magic.

Hosting videos almost no one watches is a waste of money, and deleting them is among the least worst things Twitch can do to keep the lights on.

Twitch is a massive loss leader in a hyperprofit oriented conglomerate megacorp, in a shit-tier economy thats primed to become a burning-dumpster-of-shit-tier economy very soon.

Amazon is giving people months of warning.

But people are freaking out.

....

If you want to save some videos... go buy a 1 or 2 or 4 TB HDD, internal or external, and start saving shit to it. 4 TB HDDs look like they're going for between roughly $80 to $150, or about 4 to 8 chipotle burritos delivered via personal chauffeur.

The vast majority of Twitch streams and thus highlights are in 1080p, 60fps, 6K bitrate.

Thats roughly 4.5 GB per hour, and thats rounding up.

These people complaining about 'oh it'd be a full time job to save 5,000 of footage'...

Come on.

Thats 6 of those 4 TB HDDs, for 5000 hours.

https://github.com/ihabunek/twitch-dl

This has been around since 2018, and there are batch downloader clis that people have built off of it.

You wanna save 5000 hours of your shit?

Buy some HDDs, learn how to run some python.

...

The level of entitlement is ... just comical, basically.

The alternatives Twitch would be looking at, instead of reducing cost by axing tons of videos almost no one watches, would be things like:

Making watching streaming in higher resolutions/frame rates a premium tier cost for viewers,

Dramatically amping up the presence of unskippable advertisements,

Dramatically altering the revenue splits from ad revenue and how much of a streamer subscribers payment actually goes to the streamer,

Or keeping that split the same but jacking up viewer subscription/bit costs.

A hot and uneducated take: nothing of value will be lost. Nobody will ever go searching through a defunct twitch account's 142 hours of Minecraft speedrun attempts. If it's valuable, back it up locally

While I don’t particularly care about this specific thing, I have read articles and what not suggesting that the times we live in…. In the future, are going to be similar to the dark ages because there won’t be much data that survives from all of these companies deleting everything…

MySpace is another example… geocities before it…. We have paper zines that were printed in small quantities from before the internet was around, but stuff on the internet just disappears…

I think that’s why they even started the internet archive.

I'm surprised Twitch hasn't done this sooner honestly. Considering some users have tens of thousand of hours worth of 1080p full length streams, I can only imagine how many terrabytes of data these users have been utilizing on their servers.

This should be a cautionary tale for anyone that relies too much on the cloud. You need to have your own local backups for when, not if, this eventually happens to other cloud providers in the future.

Once again reinforcing the fact that "the cloud" is still someone else's computer. If you want control over your data, you really need to look into self hosting. Otherwise, don't be surprised when that someone else decides to change the rules for using their computer. I also can't help but think that the more the internet matures, the more the version we had in the 90's makes sense. Web 2.0 was a mistake.

they should just build and maintain more datacenters to store millions of hours of useless video instead

speedrun.com leaderboards are going to be a wasteland of dead links. What do we do with records that get lost?

Eh. The Internet is too full of useless crap thst costs energy to keep alive. No one needs endless swathes of boring videos. If there are some valuable recordings there, then they can preserve those.

We have all got very accustomed to the notion that we can put content on a website and it will stay there forever, permanently available, as if that site somehow has an obligation to look after it. But they don't.

It sucks, and there will be a lot of stuff lost, but it's also good to have a reminder that if there's data you really care about, you need to look after that data yourself.

I'm way more surprised that Twitch even has video storage that old.

I have streamed a bit, and my videos were limited to one month? Maybe even less.

Twitch was never meant for video storage, so this move is not unexpected.

If you want to keep a video, download it, always. Even on Youtube you are not guaranteed to have videos forever. They still have my vid, which is almost 20 years old, nobody watches it... and it's helping no one.

Which is to say we need better preservation methods for digital content.

In announcing the change, Twitch cited the "costly" indefinite storage of these highlights, which it says are responsible for "less than 0.1% of hours watched" across the site.

I don't know how many hours are watched on Twitch, but I bet it's so many that 0.1% is still a fuckton of hours.