I’m surprised Twitch hasn’t done this sooner honestly. Considering some users have tens of thousand of hours worth of 1080p full length streams, I can only imagine how many terrabytes of data these users have been utilizing on their servers.
This should be a cautionary tale for anyone that relies too much on the cloud. You need to have your own local backups for when, not if, this eventually happens to other cloud providers in the future.
I once received 1TB free ‘lifetime’ storage from a hoster. After gladly using it for 5 years, I suddenly had to start paying €5 per month because “they could not maintain the operating costs”.
they should just build and maintain more datacenters to store millions of hours of useless video instead
speedrun.com leaderboards are going to be a wasteland of dead links. What do we do with records that get lost?
I’m particularly worried about all the historical records. Summoning Salt & similar channels are gonna have problems after this, especially after the policy has been in place for several years and stuff made in this very era expires.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Archive Team tries their best at archiving the current situation (difficult as it is) but nobody is going to bother doing it on-going and a WR obsoleted for months is interesting material only when edited into a documentary.
I’m way more surprised that Twitch even has video storage that old.
I have streamed a bit, and my videos were limited to one month? Maybe even less.
Twitch was never meant for video storage, so this move is not unexpected.
If you want to keep a video, download it, always. Even on Youtube you are not guaranteed to have videos forever. They still have my vid, which is almost 20 years old, nobody watches it… and it’s helping no one.
Which is to say we need better preservation methods for digital content.
VODs do expire automatically, but Twitch has explicitly said in the past that if you want to archive something, highlight it. Highlights WERE meant for storage. So this feels like they’re suddenly reneging on that.
We have all got very accustomed to the notion that we can put content on a website and it will stay there forever, permanently available, as if that site somehow has an obligation to look after it. But they don’t.
It sucks, and there will be a lot of stuff lost, but it’s also good to have a reminder that if there’s data you really care about, you need to look after that data yourself.
It seems like since my generation had “If you put something on the Internet it’ll be there forever” drilled into us as kids, many of us feel entitled to “the internet” preserving our data for us. Most people don’t realize how much labor and resource usage goes into preserving data forever.
Did you genuinely interpret that as a child to mean “If you put something on the Internet will be safe forever”?
As I’m sure you are now aware as an adult, the intended meaning is very much “If you put something on the Internet which is embarrassing to you or damaging to your reputation, then it will be around forever”
It’s a warning that the things you don’t want to stick around could end up being precisely the things which do.
Eh. The Internet is too full of useless crap thst costs energy to keep alive. No one needs endless swathes of boring videos. If there are some valuable recordings there, then they can preserve those.
I agree in this case but this is what they thought at the dawn of computing, too and we lost a lot of history.
True but at the dawn of computing we were too naïve. We couldn’t imagine people would record everything.
I think the point is that you can’t know what you don’t know. They weren’t naive back then, they were ignorant and limited by the technology of the time.
We preserve stuff precisely because we don’t know how it might be useful in the future.
We have a name for things we know for sure won’t be useful in the future: Trash.
Yes, absolutely, but we also preserve everything because separating the wheat from the chaff is too much work. For example, most people store all the pictures they take because it’s easier than selecting the ones we might want later. But we kmow some of them are useless.
See but that’s my point. They are useless as far as we can tell in the present.
Maybe in 2 years we will regret not having mountains of recorded streams when we’re training models for AI streamers. And so on and so forth.
Streamers can host it themselves. From what I hear around Lemmy hosting and streaming video is so cheap it can be done without money from ads ;)
“cheap” is relative.
it’s not as easy as it sounds. The hosting on Twitch wasn’t just for videos but for the chat logs synced to that video as well. So you can’t just download the videos and upload them somewhere else you have to download them using Twitch’s shitty tools so that you get the chat as well.
That takes a lot of time but they only got about a month to do that. And that assumes that one actually has the time, energy, access and expertise to download the stuff. What about disabled streamers? What about families of deceased streamers? They now have a month to figure all this stuff out if they even receive the news at all.
That is mainly an issue caused by the fact that the whole chat synchronization thing never got developed into an open format since everyone who cared about it was just fine with companies using their own proprietary format for it.
So fuck them, for something they had no control or voice over?
Well, they chose to stream on a huge company’s website and were entirely content to rely on that company for access to that data, so yes.
In announcing the change, Twitch cited the “costly” indefinite storage of these highlights, which it says are responsible for “less than 0.1% of hours watched” across the site.
I don’t know how many hours are watched on Twitch, but I bet it’s so many that 0.1% is still a fuckton of hours.
Another win for peertube and owncast.
Good, that’s a part of the internet that brought more brainrot than anything.
