Gameplay livestreaming platform Twitch is shaking up how its saves, and deletes, live broadcasts.
The company announced today that it will no longer save everyone’s livestreams as archived videos forever. Instead, it will delete all past broadcasts for nonpaying Twitch members after 14 days. Twitch will save its partners and Turbo premium subscribers’ past broadcasts for 60 days. The site will keep any highlights that players make forever. This change makes sense for Twitch, as most people do not watch archived video. When they do, they tend to find it on the Google-owned YouTube, which is working on a deal to acquire Twitch for $1 billion.
Storing video isn’t cheap, and Twitch noted that 80 percent of its storage capacity is composed of past broadcasts that no one has ever watched. The company also points out that when people do watch archived broadcasts, 84 percent of the time it is within the first 14 days of the clip’s posting.
Above: Twitch reveals behavior data regarding its viewers and past broadcasts.
By dropping the old videos, Twitch is promising to make some big improvements to the quality of its store highlights:
- Higher-quality video for international viewers
- Archived videos that now work on mobile
- Triple redundancy on stored broadcasts to ensure they’re never lost
- A new and easier way to upload highlights to YouTube
- No limit on the YouTube exporter
Twitch also revealed that it is turning off the YouTube exporter today while it makes changes and updates its backend. Expect it to come back online tomorrow.