By AJ Dellinger Published February 20, 2025 | Comments (4) | Twitch logo appears on a phone screen that sits above an illuminated keyboard. Ralf Liebhold (Shutterstock) The Internet is foreveruntil it isnt. On Wednesday, Twitch announced that it will implement new limits on archived video Highlights and Uploads that users can store on their account. The new rules, set to take effect on April 19, 2025, will set a 100-hour storage limit on saved videos. Any account with more than 100 hours of content will need to manually remove highlights and uploadsincluding unpublished content that is saved to the channel but not publicly accessibleor be subject to an automated purge of content that Twitch will carry out. The company says it will delete content with the least views, until they are under the limit. The streaming service was pretty transparent about the fact that money is the reason for the change to its archive rules: The storage of this content is costly, Twitch said, reasoning that cutting down on saved Highlights and Uploads helps us manage resources more efficientlyand continue to invest in new features and improvements. According to the company, just 0.5% of creators on the platform have exceeded the 100-hour storage limit, but that still amounts to potentially millions of hours of content that will be unceremoniously deleted, all to benefit Twitchs bottom line. Highlights were introduced as a way for creators to pick the most important moments of their own stream and curate a reel of their best content. While Twitch claims that the feature hasnt been as effective at driving engagement as it had hoped, The Verge points out that the speedrunning community has relied on Highlights to save record-breaking runs. SummoningSalt, a well-known YouTuber who creates documentaries on various speedrunning histories said on Bluesky that Twitchs decision to limit storage marks a really sad day for speedrunning.Another speedrunner, MrJimmysteel25, tweeted that for their community, highlights were never about discovery or engagement but about preserving history. People use highlights to archive, and youre destroying YEARS of speedrunning and other communites history. Users can download and save their own Highlights, but this presents a local storage problem. And the fact that Twitch has imposed this limit as a means of cost savings leaves open the possibility that an additional crunch could come if, at any point in the future, Twitch needs to juice its bottom line. It shouldnt be lost in this whole situation that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which operates the largest cloud storage platform in the world. Its just another reminder that when you trust history to a corporation, itll only preserve as much as it can monetize.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By AJ Dellinger Published January 3, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published November 26, 2024 By Harri Weber Published October 7, 2024 By Oscar Gonzalez Published June 28, 2024 By Oscar Gonzalez Published June 24, 2024 Levi Winslow, Kotaku Published April 22, 2024