Twitch Will Implement a 100 Hour Storage Limit on Highlights
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- Twitch will implement a 100 hour storage limit for highlights and uploaded content starting on April 19.
- Streamers are threatened by this change, especially speedrunners who heavily rely on highlights.
- Twitch claims that the reason they’re doing this is because highlights don’t contribute much to viewer discovery and would like to put the resources on those that do.
Twitch announced on February 20 that the streaming giant will implement a 100-hour limit on highlights and uploaded content. Twitch assures streamers that this will not apply to VODs or clips.
In addition to this, Twitch mentions that only less than 0.5% of streamers have exceeded the 100 hour limit and that the content only accounts for less than 0.1% of hours watched. Despite this, big streamers are still threatened by the change.
SummoningSalt, a YouTuber and Speedrunner, is heavily worried about the state of speedrunning on Twitch as it heavily uses highlights. Usually, these highlights are used by speedrunners to cement their personal best and as a way to show people how they did it.
Because of this, SummoningSalt made a post asking all speedrunners to download all their highlights and upload it on YouTube because there’s a high chance that a huge chunk of speedrunning history will be lost.
Twitch mentioned in their announcement that there will be a new storage tracker tab to help streamers monitor the amount of storage their highlights and uploads are taking. Twitch will also start automatically deleting highlights and uploads once the update is fully implemented. The site will start with the streamer’s least viewed Highlights, deleting as many as possible until they’re within the 100-hour cap again.
According to Twitch, the main reason why they’re doing this is because highlights haven’t been effective for viewer discovery. They followed this up that since it’s not that helpful for streamers, it’s best for them to allocate resources more on Clips and the mobile feed as they’re the ones pulling in new viewers.
Twitch is a streaming website launched in 2011. The site was bought by Amazon in February 2014. According to TwitchTracker, the average concurrent viewers on Twitch in 2024 was 2.38 million with an average of 95,700 channels streaming at any given time.
