There are playthroughs of single games that are more than 100 hours. Even if you're only playing "short" games, you're looking at 6-10 hours, which means you only give your audience a library of 10-15 vods? Average games are 20-40, so 5?
Vod viewing on twitch is also a pain, ads every 10 minutes, buggy playback, and vods don't play in order.
What's going to happen is anyone currently storing their playthroughs on twitch is now going to export to youtube. So I guess they want youtube to get the ad rev.
It'll just make also streaming to YouTube (or other services) simultaneously more attractive. Apparently Twitch has exclusivity agreements with some people, but it's already pretty common to do this.
Are there really 5+ day nonstop playthroughs? Are there just hours of no content while the streamer eats/sleeps? Why wouldn't that be split into multiple parts by the streamer, as a natural consequence of how it was recorded?
As pointed out elsewhere, past broadcasts/VODs had an autodelete horizon added years ago, so after a certain point, you'd have to reupload your content if you wanted it archived in perpetuity.
One might imagine this is just the logical followup of them adding that horizon initially, basically saying "the 1 in 200 of you who circumvented our policy, no, for real, stop that."
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.
And it might make sense, if the way youtube stores the video is more efficient. Ultimately live streaming/simulcasting are different that cold video. See how Netflix, having no problems doing efficient movie serving, doesn't do quite so great at providing a good experience in live events. And I'd bet that the storage model for youtube and Netflix is already quite different, as the number of total videos, and the distribution of who watches what, when and where, is quite different.
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.)
I would prefer views, to be honest. For example if some arbitrary content is stored for 2 months without anyone ever watching it, that feels reasonable for me to remove it, no one is watching it. Some video that is actually serving a purpose being culled just because of the arbitrary hour limit feels to me, a less reasonable stance.
In practice though I doubt this makes a huge difference either way, the vast majority of the people that can have noticeable amount of views on such already have their YouTube channels or other venues they are also making money from.
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.
Vod viewing on twitch is also a pain, ads every 10 minutes, buggy playback, and vods don't play in order.
What's going to happen is anyone currently storing their playthroughs on twitch is now going to export to youtube. So I guess they want youtube to get the ad rev.