Twitch limiting uploads to 100 hours, deleting the rest starting April 19th

YouTube profits aren't broken out separately. However, Google's quarterly and annual reports do give Youtube Ad revenues, which were $36bn in fiscal 2024. That Youtube is not profitable is quite the strong claim.....

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...

In addition to the loss leader aspect it has for their other business units, what about more traditional expenses? Directly serving ads aside, all the user behavioral and popular trend data has to be hugely valuable in its own right. Plus all that ML training data would have cost them something if they hadn't already had it sitting on their servers.

It seems like you just have to be sufficiently large before you can successfully monetize a video platform.

At least for me, right now, the home page of the app shows off a single stream it thinks I want to watch. If I click "following" it shows every online stream I follow, then VOD links for the last four VODs/streams I was watching but didn't finish, then every offline stream I follow in a very stupid order.

So as far as that experience, resuming a VOD is pretty prominent in the app.

yeah, and you can't ffwd live, either. I submitted a PR but it'll take a while for them to implement

I guess this [0] might be a decent starting point. Also consider size comparisons of various gaussian splatting techniques (ex [1] & [2]). Static 3D scenes aren't technically the same thing as a 2D time series of frames, but since videos are generally composed of highly spatially related data there's bound to be overlap (ex [1] has already been extended to support dynamic scenes).

And keep in mind that security footage has an awful lot of both static and repetitive objects. It's an ideal target for more complicated approaches to compression.

[0] https://github.com/ppingzhang/Awesome-Deep-Learning-Based-Vi...

[1] https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/

[2] https://jasonlsc.github.io/nerfcodec_homepage/

You have to regurgitate (reframe your personal story in the context of) leadership principles in your interviews for an IC role too.

No, frugality has been an Amazon "value" from the beginning. Look up the story of Jeff Bezos famously using an old door for a desk. Or all the execs complaining about having to share a hotel room during business trips for the first couple of decades of Amazon's existence.

According to https://link.twitch.tv/storage Twitch's limit is 100 hours stored total, not just per-video

So you'd hit the limit after 600 ten-minute videos, or 100 hour-long videos.

The limit also seems to apply to "Highlights" and "Uploads" but not to "Past Broadcasts", "VODs" or "Clips" for added confusion.

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.

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.)

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.

Tell user "stop that".

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.

> just $500

That's the cost for just buying disks, but storing data in the cloud costs more than that and it's an ongoing cost.

S3 charges 1.25c/GB/month for this sort of data. So that's $200/month for just this guy. There may be 100s or thousands of these people. Easily adds up.

I don't think you've thought this through. You can't _just_ bill the owner a couple of bucks each month. You need a whole infrastructure to do that. You need to plan, design, build, test, deploy, maintain, and provide customer service for an entire new feature of your site. You need to research, test, revise and communicate what the price for storage is going to be (and handle the immediate and ongoing backlash). You need to catrgorize and plan for this new income stream AS WELL AS the costs to get it started and the ongoing costs to maintain it.

That's all just off the top of my head, and all of that is going to be fighting against all the other projects that people want to get done, projects that are likely way more profitable and way closer to the primary goal of the company -- being an intentional streaming service, not an accidental video hosting service.

> and your 6Mbps is likely bit high IMHO

6Mbps is Twitches recommended ingest bitrate, and their highest quality just serves the ingested stream back to viewers without transcoding. In reality the storage would actually be a little higher still because they have to store all the transcoded lower resolution versions as well.

I remember when Twitch implemented the VOD expiration with the "highlight" system; the discourse at the time was that some people enabled VOD retention and then forgot about it, uselessly clogging the servers. So if you really cared about retaining VODs, you just had to highlight them. I think they just counted on no one caring enough, since highlighting every single VOD is a pain.

It turns out that most people who cared enough about retaining VODs just upload them to Youtube. Youtube is simply a better viewing experience for non-live videos, and it can generate some revenue (though usually very small, unless you have a huge amount of views). One problem with Youtube is that it's more strict about (what it thinks is) copyright content -- for example, some otherwise "free"[1] videogame music is regularly claimed by on Youtube by someone who sampled the original song, so it registers as someone else's content to Youtube's content ID.

[1] By "free" I mean that original videogame music is not usually actively protected (even though it's under copyright), because publishers love when people promote their games.

Jeff?

Well, the settings page on Twitch has this help text on the "store past broadcasts" toggle:

  Automatically save broadcasts for up to 7 days (14 days for Affiliates, 60 days for Partners, Turbo and Prime users)

Maybe the video you're seeing is a highlight? Either way, I can't see it because I don't subscribe to Khaldor (I used to love watching his Starcraft 2 casts back in the day, though).

It's been awhile since I was in that world, but I have to imagine that if you have a site whose traffic is growing at a good rate, you don't need to pitch that many investors. Some seed funding could get you enough runway to pay the AWS bills.

You very rarely hear of the startup who ran out of money because they had too much traffic.

Surely. But starting a streaming video site that gains traction and scales is easier now than when Twitch did it, I am sure.