[DanHulton]

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.

[redserk]

That’s just looking at theoretical costs but completely ignores the actual revenue side.

If they annoy the most active streamers to the point they leave to another site, why should a viewer stay at Twitch versus just using another site?

I’m assuming some of these accounts bring in far more than the $500-1000 it costs to host old video.

Going from an unknown limit down to 100 hours with little notice shows how shortsighted Twitch was here.

[rane]

Doesn't the infrastructure already exist?

[DanHulton]

Pardon, not the storage infrastructure, but the tracking, billing, taxation, customer support, etc. infrastructure.

It's a whole new income stream, which becomes a whole new line of business, and that business requires a variety of infrastructure to support it, especially at a large company.

[littlestymaar]

Of course it does, these dudes already have this amount of video stored on Twitch's server.

[pythonaut_16]

It’s Twitch not some indie startup.

You’re not entirely wrong but you’re exaggerating the difficulty.