Twitch will be removing older broadcasts soon
Twitch announced an upcoming change (also on Twitter) that affects storage of older streams on their site, starting in April.
What Twitch calls “Past Broadcasts” or “Recent Broadcasts” are automatic recordings of streams. They’re saved for 7 days, or for 60 days if the streamer has Twitch Prime or Twitch Turbo. Those recordings are not affected by this change.
“Highlights” are a way to edit those broadcasts down, and, in the past, a way to make them available on Twitch indefinitely. Starting in April, storage for Highlights will be limited to 100 hours total per channel. My highlights of Maupiti Island alone are 151 hours, and I usually spend 20-30 hours on each game I play. This effectively makes it impossible to preserve older streams on Twitch.
Highlights have always been difficult to browse and discover due to Twitch’s site design. Part of the reason I created this site was to make it easier to find my past streams in the archive. My hope was that Twitch would eventually address those shortcomings. Unfortunately they have decided to take a very opposite approach, making it impossible to preserve broadcasts beyond 60 days.
Here’s what this means for my channel:
- In the future, my archive will only include links to videos on my YouTube channel. I’ll be removing links to Twitch over the next couple of months.
- My recent broadcasts will continue to be available on my Twitch channel for up to 60 days. You’ll still be able to catch up on recent streams that you missed!
- It will no longer be possible to watch older streams with chat included. This is disappointing to me. Some channels include chat over the stream itself, but for me I think this would be too cluttered or force me to remove my notes cam. I’ll most likely keep things as is, and continue read comments out loud when I respond to them, but some context will be lost without the full chat.
One last note: this will affect my revenue from streaming a bit. As a Twitch Affiliate, I earn a small amount of income each time an ad is shown on my channel. (If you have Turbo, I get that income each time an ad would have been shown.) I don’t earn anything from YouTube views because I haven’t met the requirements to become a YouTube Partner. If you’d like to, you can help me get there by subscribing to my YouTube channel. It’s free! I don’t rely on streaming revenue, but it does help me stream regularly, and make improvements to the stream and this site.