Twitch has dumped a massive, time-consuming task on a lot of streamers with its recent announcement of a 100-hour storage limit on Highlights and Uploads, which is already proving to be an enormous problem for some.
Yesterday, the Amazon-owned streaming service confirmed that, as of April 19, "all Highlights and Uploads, whether published or unpublished, will count towards a single 100-hour storage limit." VODs and clips don't count towards the limit, but it's still a very strict cap to be brought in with just two months' notice, especially when anyone still over the limit by April "will risk having their Highlights and Uploads automatically deleted, starting with Highlights with the least views, until they are under the limit."
As you might expect, some streamers are already way over that limit, to the point where deleting a couple of clips here and there is going to do absolutely nothing to satisfy Twitch's new restrictions. "I'M SO COOKED MAN," declares Mario speedrunner Jhay, sharing a screenshot of over 2,575 hours of content. "Only been streaming since 2020 btw LMAO, I can't imagine how bad it is for people who have been going way longer."
And, oh boy, is it bad for some. Variety streamer iateyourpie is dealing with over 4,090 hours of content, while usedpizza is faced with 4,890 hours of videos to sort through. What's more, the message informing these creators that they're over the storage limit also confirms that they can't "create Highlights or Upload new content until you free up storage space," which is way easier said than done when you're dealing with this much. Twitch stated in its announcement that "less than 0.5% of active channels" would be affected, but when you consider how many channels exist, that's still a considerable number of people.
woot pic.twitter.com/HKcw3ZHSHkFebruary 20, 2025
When the change was announced yesterday, speedrunning historian SummoningSalt was quick to warn speedrunners that "huge amounts of speedrunning history will be lost" if affected videos aren't uploaded to YouTube. The point of speedrunning might be to be fast, but all those runs take time, and documenting them is crucial not just to evidence records, but to immortalize the efforts of the people behind them.
With that said, I can't imagine how long it'd take to download thousands of hours of content, let alone upload it all again – here's hoping we won't lose too much as a result.
