The big problem with this move is that it doesn't give people enough time to migrate, and they can't make new highlights while they struggle to download upwards of 3000 hours (in the multiple terabytes) of old video, at the same time as hundreds or thousands of other partners doing the same thing.
This affects far more people at a much higher scale than Twitch will admit, and the deadline given isn't enough for these data transfers to complete.
There are playthroughs of single games that are more than 100 hours. Even if you're only playing "short" games, you're looking at 6-10 hours, which means you only give your audience a library of 10-15 vods? Average games are 20-40, so 5?
Vod viewing on twitch is also a pain, ads every 10 minutes, buggy playback, and vods don't play in order.
What's going to happen is anyone currently storing their playthroughs on twitch is now going to export to youtube. So I guess they want youtube to get the ad rev.
It'll just make also streaming to YouTube (or other services) simultaneously more attractive. Apparently Twitch has exclusivity agreements with some people, but it's already pretty common to do this.
Are there really 5+ day nonstop playthroughs? Are there just hours of no content while the streamer eats/sleeps? Why wouldn't that be split into multiple parts by the streamer, as a natural consequence of how it was recorded?
As pointed out elsewhere, past broadcasts/VODs had an autodelete horizon added years ago, so after a certain point, you'd have to reupload your content if you wanted it archived in perpetuity.
One might imagine this is just the logical followup of them adding that horizon initially, basically saying "the 1 in 200 of you who circumvented our policy, no, for real, stop that."
There have been streamers doing subathons of 30+ days. They usually eat while doing something else/watching something they will comment later, while they sleep there is either no content or some friends/moderators talk to the viewers.
And it might make sense, if the way youtube stores the video is more efficient. Ultimately live streaming/simulcasting are different that cold video. See how Netflix, having no problems doing efficient movie serving, doesn't do quite so great at providing a good experience in live events. And I'd bet that the storage model for youtube and Netflix is already quite different, as the number of total videos, and the distribution of who watches what, when and where, is quite different.
It doesn't even have to be more efficient, necessarily, just valuable enough to be more worthwhile.
In this case, they seem to be saying long-form archives aren't helping their business and are very expensive.
Of course, since that also de facto means people start pointing to their YouTube pages as their content archives, that means they think they have such a better platform for live content that they can survive people doing the calculus of "well, if I have to host my old content on YT anyway, why am I using Twitch if I'm just going to upload to YT after..."
Whether that's true or not, we'll see. (One might argue this is a given comparing the number of people I know who stream on Twitch versus YT, but Twitch is also the place that thought people wanted them to integrate a game store in their desktop app, and appears to have the attention span of a squirrel in long-term platform initiatives, so...we'll see.)
(I work for Google, I've never worked on anything related to YouTube, opinions my own.)
I would prefer views, to be honest. For example if some arbitrary content is stored for 2 months without anyone ever watching it, that feels reasonable for me to remove it, no one is watching it. Some video that is actually serving a purpose being culled just because of the arbitrary hour limit feels to me, a less reasonable stance.
In practice though I doubt this makes a huge difference either way, the vast majority of the people that can have noticeable amount of views on such already have their YouTube channels or other venues they are also making money from.
this seems really trivial to detect. dump current viewcounts of all VOD into a table somewhere, and then check however often you feel like to see if any of the ones with less than one view per unit of time you decide, are now getting many views.
Twitch only stores Past Broadcasts for 2 months before they're automatically deleted. If you want to keep them past the 2 months, you have to convert them into Highlights, which are affected.
So yes, this will absolutely affect the speedrunning community, and anyone else who has been using this method to archive old streams.
I was under the impression that the principal objective of speed running was to get things done quickly. You should be able to fit a lot of valuable information within the quota if you are any good at it.
This comes from a misunderstanding of what speedrunning is.
It's not merely doing something quickly; it's more akin to a sport.
The objective of speedrunning is to perform something you would do in a game in a record time, or it's now been somewhat expanded to sometimes include or mean some extraordinary feat in a game that may not be directly related to speed.
A speedrun of a game might mean to complete a game that would normally take months in (for example) "only 10 hours", in which case the speedrunner needs to be live for those ten hours. A recording is not an acceptable substitute due to issues of cheating[1].
Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.
[1] It's still possible to cheat live, but it's more complicated, more challenging, and there's a greater likelihood of being caught.
> Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.
I am still not following why Twitch needs to maintain live copies of all the failed runs. Once you hit the objective, make that video the highlight or whatever to be persisted indefinitely.
Why would anyone care about watching several hours of something when they know ahead of time it's not going to be representative of a successful outcome? Iteration #17 out of hundreds can't possibly be valuable enough to justify the storage cost in even the most charitable of cases. It seems to me that most of speed running could be done completely offline without involving the internet and video capture technology (i.e., practicing a musical instrument).
Speedrunning in terms of archiving the completed run for future reference as the Thing To Beat, sure.
But part of the reason this has become such a popular thing is the community aspect of it - people get drawn in and inspired to participate because they get engaged in the community of either particular runners or the wider community of people who follow all the runners of some games.
At least for me, while I've never had the desire to participate, when I was sick for a year or so, and therefore at home with little ability to participate in a lot of other things, I went down the rabbit hole of watching different runs of different games, and one of the more useful tools and timesinks was being able to watch the past broadcasts of different runners and seeing if they were enjoyable to watch, at the particular game whose speedruns were interesting me at the moment.
And since not everyone just runs one or two things, sometimes their last runs of those games were months in the past.
So at least in my n=1 experience, those broadcast archives specifically were quite useful for me as a viewer and person attempting to discover more streamers to watch.
Watching the speedrunner improve, watching them discover new techniques, the discussion they have with their audience, etc. Speedrunning, ironically, is not just about the destination: it's about the (often public!) journey the speedrunner took to get there.
As the others have said, it's about the journey, so let me expand on this a bit.
Streaming games has a large social component, whether it's speedrunning, or just casual play. It's often as much about the personality of the player as it is about the game. People watch as a communal activity.
- Why is it so long?
In this game, items evolve over time. There is an item, the Shampoo, that takes literally 2 weeks (= 336 hours) to evolve into Splendid Hair.
Not really. That's like saying a wrestler is only in the match for a few minutes so why do they need all of that training.
Speedrunners are often playing the game or parts of the game hundreds of times. And they're usually performing techniques that take lots of precision and therefore lots of practice.
So they stream it all, documenting their attempts and trying new strategies in front of a live audience. They produce so much comment that there are YouTube channels that make documentaries about different speedrunners.
one of the only long speedruns i ever watched was the ~28 hour Red Dead Redemption 2 speedrun. these are called like no-glitch any% runs, meaning no sidestepping content in a way that isn't intended (eg in gta using an ambulance to get over the gated walls). So "the fastest a game can be played from beginning to end credits, normally."
These are different than the glitch any% runs, which, for example, Fallout 4 is something like 34 seconds, you do something to fall through the ground and then run to a specific place and it triggers the <no spoilers>, end credits roll.
Speedrunning is mostly cheaters using combinations of emulation, save states, etc. I don't think speedrunners actually speedrun on unmodified consoles in one go at all these days. Of course back in the day anything other than playing on a console attached to a TV would have been considered cheating and gotten you thrown out of the community.
tomorrow evening around 5AM UTC i will try to have a "Show HN: Seamlessly move your VOD from twitch to youtube (or...)" there is a youtube-uploader (or was) that i've used in the past for unattended uploads. yt-dlp <twitch vod uri> | youtube-upload
