Twitch wants to cut down on the amount of money it spends letting creators store stuff on its platform. It automatically deletes all VOD recordings of streamers’ broadcasts after 60 days, a move that undercuts its ability to compete–if it wanted to–with the viewership generated by VOD monsters like YouTube. We sort of get it; by deleting VODs, Twitch pushes that FOMO feeling, where viewers might miss a peak moment on a streamer’s channel if they don’t tune in live right now.
But streamers aren’t happy with auto-VOD deletion–and some of them are about to be even more unhappy, because Twitch is further cutting storage space by auto-deleting Highlights once a creator has reached 100 hours of storage time.
We’re implementing a 100 hr storage limit for Highlights & Uploads starting 4/19. This won’t apply to Past Broadcasts (VODs) or clips.
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Less than 0.5% of streamers exceed 100hrs & this content accounts for <0.1% of hours watched. Users will be notified.https://t.co/RoDIAEzBV5 pic.twitter.com/zN7iKHpSqm
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) February 19, 2025
The Highlights feature allows creators to scrub through a VOD and pull together some of their best moments into one reel. This, as you can probably imagine, is a valuable tool for gamers. Creators can use it to compile their top shots from an Apex Legends or Marvel Rivals stream, or all their daring escapes during a session of Dead by Daylight.
And, as The Verge points out, Highlights are specifically important to the speedrunning community, because they stay on Twitch’s platform even after the full stream VOD has been deleted. Because so many speedrunning records are set live, Highlights has effectively made Twitch a library for top speedrunning moments, capturing the second they were set as well as the streamer and audience’s reactions.
You might be thinking, Can’t people just use Clips?
Well, not really. Clips, another Twitch tool, has some limits. It lets anyone–not just the streamer–pull out up to 60 seconds of consecutive footage from one stream, and turn that footage into its own short-form video. Since Clips are crowdsourced, people who aren’t the creator have the the control to delete them.
With Highlights, footage doesn’t have to be consecutive; it can be sewn together from across the entire VOD. There’s also no limit to how long they can be. And, as we mentioned above, they remain on Twitch’s platform after the source VOD has been deleted. One last perk: They also permanently show what chatters were saying during the highlighted moments, while chat records disappear from Clips once the source VOD has been deleted.
Now, to be clear, streamers can download their VODs, make a highlights reel manually, and upload that reel to YouTube or another platform. That’s what the vast majority of Twitch streamers with YouTube channels do.
But with this change, anyone who does use Highlights consistently will have to be sure they keep their total recording time below 100 hours. If they go over, Twitch will auto-delete Highlights until the channel is back under 100 hours. (This change also affects Uploads, aka content that’s created with a third-party site and uploaded to Twitch.)
“Introducing this 100-hour storage limit, which impacts less than 0.5 percent of active channels on Twitch and accounts for less than 0.1 percent of hours watched, helps us manage resources more efficiently, maintain support of highlights and uploads, and continue to invest in new features and improvements to more effective viewer engagement tools like Clips and the mobile feed,” Twitch said.
Again, while this change will only impact 0.5% of active channels, it may disproportionately impact creator communities like speedrunners.
“Not just world records, but most every run submitted that was on Twitch is stored as a highlight on speedrun.com. That includes users who no longer run, no longer stream, no longer have an online presence, or may even not be alive anymore,” user FKAsocks noted on Twitch’s ‘User Voice’ forum. “Crippling the highlights feature is going to be an unmitigated disaster for speedrun history.”
Other commenters pointed out that while 100 hours seems like a lot of storage time, it may be smaller than you think. “The last full playthrough of a game I have saved on my channel as highlights was just over 200 hours,” streamer MissingMeshTV wrote. “I’ll be starting my 6th year on Twitch shortly and have over 2600 hours of all my playthroughs, complete with chat history here. And you’re just going to take it away without even having the decency to offer me the option to keep any of it beyond 100 hours.”
Based on Twitch’s statement, it seems to want people to shift toward using short-form, lower-storage-lift Clips. We’re not surprised, because though Clips has fewer features than Highlights, it’s what Twitch uses to populate its TikTok-esque Discovery feed.
This change kicks in April 19. Anyone with over 100 hours of Highlights and/or Uploads on their channel after that date will see their content deleted until they’re back under the limit.
