[littlestymaar]

> That's the cost for just buying disks, but storing data in the cloud costs more than that and it's an ongoing cost.

> S3 charges 1.25c/GB/month for this sort of data.

It doesn't cost them anywhere close that. Their competitors charge twice as less or more an still make money.

Twitch belongs to Amazon, they are the cloud.

Setting up your own infra to handle this is of course going to cost you a lot more than that, but when you have the infra set up then the marginal price is hardware (+ a monthly electricity bill, which is not as high as for other kind of workload).

And even if they had to charge $200 a month, they should probably offer the option instead of just removing the content: we're talking about professionals who make money out of the platform (and earn Twitch their income), they can make the choice whether or not they can afford it.

[IshKebab]

> And even if they had to charge $200 a month, they should probably offer the option instead of just removing the content: we're talking about professionals who make money out of the platform

There's no way these professionals have 6000 hours of interesting content and there's no way they would pay $200/month to store it. They're just saving everything they ever record because it's free.

Implementing that feature would cost more money than it would ever make.

[littlestymaar]

> There's no way these professionals have 6000 hours of interesting content and there's no way they would pay $200/month to store it. They're just saving everything they ever record because it's free.

Some of these people have been streaming for 15 years, it's far from “everything they ever record” (and some content creators in twitter/bluesky links elsewhere in this discussion explicitly said they did select content).

Likely they would be more picky in their selection if they had to pay, but that doesn't mean they would be ready to pay something for a thousand hours instead of 100. 100 hours is a ridiculous amount!

> Implementing that feature would cost more money than it would ever make.

It's no more work than implementing a hard threshold. They did change the system in the first place, they could have made this change much better had they cared…