Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

#31

Post by moogly »

slightwinder wrote: post #14
AndrewDucker wrote: post #7

I assume Twitch doesn't make much from people watching old streams. Do they put adverts on them? I watch a lot of gaming playthroughs on YouTube, frequently years after they happened. I guess Twitch isn't in that market.

> I assume Twitch doesn't make much from people watching old streams. Something like 0.5% of all viewtime goes to them, according to Twitch. > Do they put adverts on them? They have ads on VODs (records of recent streams from the last 30-60 days), so I guess they have them also on the Highlights. And it seems Twitch is grabbing all the income from those ads, streamers get nothing. Speaks loud if they still think it's…

> Something like 0.5% of all viewtime goes to them, according to Twitch.

That's a lot of minutes.

> To date, Twitch content has been viewed for 21 BILLION hours[1]

[1] https://twitchtracker.com/statistics

Re: Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

#32

Post by xrisk »

noah_buddy wrote: post #24
mrkramer wrote: post #11

Facebook is doing the same thing[0] meaning that YouTube is Web's utility at this point. Google is so profitable that they will not put any limit on your YouTube storage anytime soon. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/facebook-now-only-stores-l...

I have been dealing with extracting photos from Google photos in a reasonable way. That experience has reminded the only backup is the backup you fully control. Download your content, duplicate it on a second disk, and use a general purpose cloud storage system to sync it.

Does google takeout not work? I’ve been intending to help my partner move off of Google Photos and takeout is what I had planned.

Re: Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

#33

Post by nashashmi »

mrkramer wrote: post #11

Facebook is doing the same thing[0] meaning that YouTube is Web's utility at this point. Google is so profitable that they will not put any limit on your YouTube storage anytime soon. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/facebook-now-only-stores-l...

Google is so good at making money that they won’t let opportunities like removing “non revenue generating content” and “high maintenance content” pass them by. A problem that started with larry page visiting steve jobs in his deathbed.

The days of accumulating data for it to be profitable someday in the future are going away with the introduction of AI. Once the videos have quenched research possibilities, the data will be removed.

And google street view will need a license to use

Re: Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

#34

Post by slightwinder »

moogly wrote: post #31
slightwinder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume Twitch doesn't make much from people watching old streams. Something like 0.5% of all viewtime goes to them, according to Twitch. > Do they put adverts on them? They have ads on VODs (records of recent streams from the last 30-60 days), so I guess they have them also on the Highlights. And it seems Twitch is grabbing all the income from those ads, streamers get nothing. Speaks loud if they still think it's…

> Something like 0.5% of all viewtime goes to them, according to Twitch. That's a lot of minutes. > To date, Twitch content has been viewed for 21 BILLION hours[1] [1] https://twitchtracker.com/statistics

Indeed, on an individual level this seems like much, but on the global level it's still not much. At worst, you will lose a low number of users.

But I have to correct myself, highlights make up <0.1% of viewing time, but this change will impact 0.5% of streamers.

Re: Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

#36

Post by anshumankmr »

Meekro wrote: post #20
fennecbutt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? All this stuff costs money. Blame all the fuckwits of the world for uploading yet another "40 hours of black screen with a metal pipe sound randomly through the video" video. I saw they take in like 4.3PB a day but that post was from years ago so it's probably even more, now.

Those 40 hours of black screen probably compress pretty well. If that's not good enough, maybe reducing old/unwatched content to 480p would be a good alternative to just purging it? Also, 4.3PB per day, at today's newegg HDD prices, is about $100k per day or $36.5 million per year. Yeah, you have to consider replication and whatnot, but you get the point-- this is pocket change for Google.

Acquiring the SSD isn't the only cost, it's also paying for power, the cost of the buildings they are housed in, the staff to look after such hardware, hiring SREs to maintain availability etc which will also make it higher.

Re: Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

#37

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

jayflux wrote: post #13

In a speed running context, those saying “the streamers just need to save their best content and ditch the rest”. I think this works if we’re assuming all those world record holders are still active, I can imagine many have gone on to other things or haven’t logged into their account in years. So it will certainly need to be a community effort to try and preserve some historic runs done over the years. I don’t even k…

Fundamentally, you should have multiple copies of any data you really want to keep. Those copies should be spread across multiple storage media and physical locations. Optimally, you retain direct control of some subset of the copies.

Disasters happen. Even in absence of this policy change, what would the community do if weather, fire, malicious actors, etc caused some massive failure that resulted in substantial data loss for Twitch? No warning, no time window, it's just gone?

Events like these, where it's not sudden and complete loss, are great reminders to actually protect data you think is worth protecting. Twitch is one "copy" and not one that is directly controlled by the creator.

As to archival options when the original creator is no longer available for whatever reason, there's always the option of screen recording. This will be somewhat lossy versus the original video, but it works.

Re: Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

#38

Post by sleepytimetea »

xrisk wrote: post #32
noah_buddy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been dealing with extracting photos from Google photos in a reasonable way. That experience has reminded the only backup is the backup you fully control. Download your content, duplicate it on a second disk, and use a general purpose cloud storage system to sync it.

Does google takeout not work? I’ve been intending to help my partner move off of Google Photos and takeout is what I had planned.

It works well.

Re: Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

#39

Post by password4321 »

mrkramer wrote: post #11

Facebook is doing the same thing[0] meaning that YouTube is Web's utility at this point. Google is so profitable that they will not put any limit on your YouTube storage anytime soon. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/facebook-now-only-stores-l...

Google will do the same thing, it's only a question of when (and I will be in trouble when they do!) The first step in this direction was turning off Google Photos free storage at lower resolution.

Re: Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

#40

Post by catlikesshrimp »

skerit wrote: post #21

I never really considered Twitch to be a platform that _kept_ videos, only stream them to the viewer. If you're on Twitch and you want to make your video permanent, you have to upload it to Youtube. That's how most of the streamers I watch handle it anyway.

Google is a solid behemoth, but they don't provide safekeeping for regular users.

Without recourse, they can lock you out of your account, or delete pieces of your data for umbrella reasons (copyright, csam, undisclosed)

That said, saving the stream as a video to youtube is a good idea because of redundancy.

Post reply on HN