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The people complaining about this in the article are largely hysterical and delusional.
Perfect embodiment of ‘always online’ brain.
They genuinely believe Twitch is some kind of public good, some kind of default level of infrastructure like plumbing, that just works, forever, with no problems, because magic.
Hosting videos almost no one watches is a waste of money, and deleting them is among the least worst things Twitch can do to keep the lights on.
Twitch is a massive loss leader in a hyperprofit oriented conglomerate megacorp, in a shit-tier economy thats primed to become a burning-dumpster-of-shit-tier economy very soon.
Amazon is giving people months of warning.
But people are freaking out.
…
If you want to save some videos… go buy a 1 or 2 or 4 TB HDD, internal or external, and start saving shit to it. 4 TB HDDs look like they’re going for between roughly $80 to $150, or about 4 to 8 chipotle burritos delivered via personal chauffeur.
The vast majority of Twitch streams and thus highlights are in 1080p, 60fps, 6K bitrate.
Thats roughly 4.5 GB per hour, and thats rounding up.
These people complaining about ‘oh it’d be a full time job to save 5,000 of footage’…
Come on.
Thats 6 of those 4 TB HDDs, for 5000 hours.
https://github.com/ihabunek/twitch-dl
This has been around since 2018, and there are batch downloader clis that people have built off of it.
You wanna save 5000 hours of your shit?
Buy some HDDs, learn how to run some python.
…
The level of entitlement is … just comical, basically.
The alternatives Twitch would be looking at, instead of reducing cost by axing tons of videos almost no one watches, would be things like:
Making watching streaming in higher resolutions/frame rates a premium tier cost for viewers,
Dramatically amping up the presence of unskippable advertisements,
Dramatically altering the revenue splits from ad revenue and how much of a streamer subscribers payment actually goes to the streamer,
Or keeping that split the same but jacking up viewer subscription/bit costs.
A hot and uneducated take: nothing of value will be lost. Nobody will ever go searching through a defunct twitch account’s 142 hours of Minecraft speedrun attempts. If it’s valuable, back it up locally
I think this can be true for large swaths of the information that will be lost, but there’s also a lot that will be lost that nobody is currently backing up. For instance:
- Recordings people think are backed up simply because they’re misinformed, only to realize all their old, say, childhood gaming videos are now lost forever
- Clips that show damning behavior about a popular public figure that weren’t caught before, but could become evidence in a future investigation
- Clips previously thought to not be relevant, that then become relevant later on for some kind of general historical context (e.g. Campaigns started trying to figure out if something was in a game at a given time in a game with very little actual software backed up, devlog streams that contained lost features that could explain why a game then developed the way it is today, etc)
nothing of value will be lost
I’d argue the opposite: there’s actually a lot of stuff out there that’s actually interesting: old-school lets-players who’d have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It’s kind of a dying art, but it’s also exactly the kind of content that’s going to get purged by this kind of action.
It’s interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it’d be a shame to have that vanish.
But not entirely unexpected since that’s not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)
While I don’t particularly care about this specific thing, I have read articles and what not suggesting that the times we live in…. In the future, are going to be similar to the dark ages because there won’t be much data that survives from all of these companies deleting everything…
MySpace is another example… geocities before it…. We have paper zines that were printed in small quantities from before the internet was around, but stuff on the internet just disappears…
I think that’s why they even started the internet archive.
I don’t care if its seen as entitled as someone else said. If companies want to make money as a monopoly they should be held to a higher standard. They have to give us a bonus for selling data, why else am I going to use their service.
Regardless I do think it is a sign of the times, going dark on data will do nobody besides oligarchs any good.
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”.
Attract people with free, then try to charge them when you reach sufficiently large user numbers. Tale as old as the tech bubble.
Well to be honest; the original hoster was amazing. But they got bought by a big hosting group and it turned to shit after that.
Once again reinforcing the fact that “the cloud” is still someone else’s computer. If you want control over your data, you really need to look into self hosting. Otherwise, don’t be surprised when that someone else decides to change the rules for using their computer. I also can’t help but think that the more the internet matures, the more the version we had in the 90’s makes sense. Web 2.0 was a mistake.
The cloud is one of the worst industry terms ever created. Old people still have zero concept and ability to understand how it works. Just had to deal with this with a grandmother who “backed up everything to the cloud before I reset it!”
It basically started out as a literal cloud for “everything else” in network diagrams.
And they only switched from using a black box to a cloud so it was less scary looking for the marketing types
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?
Well I guess they could download them all?
All of it? On such short notice?
I mean, maybe? They have 'til April it seems. Time to make
yt-dlpwork overtime I guess…
Download them and host them yourself.
A month’s notice just isn’t enough time to archive this much history.
Especially for smaller communities. I’m sure that MC and Ocarina of Time will be able to save everything they need but so many small communities will probably loose most of their records. Loosing so much knowledge in the process.
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.
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.
Who gets to decide what’s valuable?
There’s definitely a spectrum, but I would hope creators themselves could do that.
Hopefully the content creator instead of the platform.
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.
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.
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.
Well this is only for accounts with over 100 hours of highlights. If you have more, you either are abusing it or doing this semi seriously and should consider backing up actual highlights.
Videos are massive and nothing is free. Storage costs. People should backup stiff they care about.
My own account was just over the limit and I certainly wasn’t ‘abusing’ it.
100 hours isn’t nearly as much as you think it is. I’ve just had my account for a long time and the things I wanted to save added up over the years.
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.
Hours watched != Hours stored.
Any number of either is going to be huge for Twitch… but this is a no brainer, if a huge chunk of your costs don’t even generate a significant amount of views, muchless actual revenue… yeah it makes sense to stop making storing them.
You’ve probably got something that looks like the US income distrobution chart, probably evennmore extreme, for # of videos vs # view time, ie:
Replace the x axis with ‘videos by watchtime percentile’ and the y axis with ‘actual watchtime’.
So, you draw a horizontal line, everything that doesn’t get above about $150k on this chart is not being watched by enough people to be worth hosting (hosting realtime access to videos for tens of millions of people is very expensive).
Then, work backwards to figure out a cap for storage that applies to everyone, to be more fair than just outright de-listing videos by low recent view count, which will result in roughly the same amount of no longer provided storage, and allow 2 months for people to save off platform whatever they want, and choose how to trim down their hosted videos on their own.
it definitely is and I bet a lot of the people that are watching them are spending more money on the site than many other people because they are so dedicated to a content creator.
Yeah, maybe. A lot of that is also probably people that put up someone’s 80 hour Minecraft vod on repeat to fall asleep to
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.
Your friends must love you lmao
It sucks but I understand the reasons. Anything of true importance to someone should have been downloaded and/or upload somewhere else as it happens.
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.
Another win for peertube and owncast.
