Next month, on May 19th, Twitch is purging highlights from channels with over 100 hours of stored videos. This announcement came out back in Febuary with the original date being April 19th. Since then, I’ve been working on exporting WelpSquadTV’s archived streams over to Youtube. We have been saving our entire broadcasts as highlights since we started streaming in 2017. It has long been a running joke that we must be costing Amazon a ton in video storage.
Turns out, we were right. The reasoning Twitch sent out to channels affected by this, and later added to their FAQ, is that storage is expensive. Which, fair, but it’s got to be less costly if you’re Amazon and you own all the storage right? My favorite bit though, is that less than 0.5% of Twitch channels are effected by this. I’ve never been in the top 0.5% of anything so I’m taking this as a win! I guess accumulating 3353 hours of saved video over the past 8 years will do that.
A few years ago, we did start moving some of our older videos over to Youtube with Twitch’s built in export feature. Back then, I remember it being a gamble whether or not the video actually got exported. Which lead to exporting one or two at a time, waiting 10 minutes to see if they showed up on Youtube and then start the next few videos. It seems that this feature has improved over the years and at least I’m able to “bulk export” videos out. I still have to click the export button on each video but they all make it over to Youtube.
There seems to be an upload limit for Youtube. At some point, the exports just stop working. I haven’t figured out if this is a video limit or a video hours limit but I seem to hit it after uploading about 100 videos (the most Twitch Video Producer will show on a page). And this appears to reset every day. It’s still pretty lenient, these videos are 2+ hours long after all.
So for the last 2 months, I have been dutifully moving everything over to Youtube. I’m going to just get everything uploaded before Saturday (the original April 19th deadline) and I will be glad to have finished this project. Though now that the deadline has been extended I may be a little more lax on hitting those upload numbers.
In case you’re wondering what the analytics of a Youtube channel uploading one hundred, 2 hour long plus videos a day, without tags, descriptions, or thumbnails:
I find it interesting that the average watch time is just about 18 minutes. I’m surprised anyone is clicking on these in the first place, let alone letting it run for 18 minutes. They must be sleeping through an auto play or something….Speaking of clicks, I love that impression click through rate is impressively low, but .4% or 450,000 impressions is still many, many clicks!
Many Welps 