I remember hearing that YouTube would store bit-for-bit copies of whatever you uploaded, allow you to download it, and wouldn’t check that it was a valid video file.

So we just need to encode our data files into a video format? Sure? There’ll be a lot of overhead due to redundancy to account for compression, but it’s free :)

There's a lot of projects that attempt/do this:

https://github.com/wau/YDrive

https://github.com/TheApeMachine/cloudtube

MP4 is a VERY flexible container format....

No—that’s the trick. It didn’t care if it was actually a video format.

The implication being they still save it permanently, but now they validate it's a video feed. So all you need to do is encode your data as valid video.

Then you just package it and resell it.

I was on this team at the time. We did it because we had the videos stored on our own JBODs and were running out of space. We could also accidentally and permanently lose some VODs because of the lack of redundancy.

What do they do now? Only store a certain number of hours?

What about their most popular / famous streamers?

Why isn't YouTube buckling under the same pressure?

>Extended VOD Storage: Partners have VODs stored for 60 days, vs only 14 days for Affiliates.

Youtube is riding the long tail with ads. Hardly anyone watches past VODs on Twitch.

So Twitch is 100% live content. If the technology were easy to replicate and the talent/streamers went elsewhere, Twitch would have nothing?

Twitch has the audience. For that reason the talent and streamers won't go elsewhere. Unless you offer them a sweetheart deal - which other streaming services have in the past - but none of those deals have worked out favorably for those streaming services.

Exactly this. A streamer's audience is only "their" audience the way that say the audience for Game of Thrones was "their" audience. It's a very, very long tail.

Other outfits can probably injure Twitch by poaching key stars, but it's not a path to success for these rival services. The absolute most they can achieve is kill off Twitch, at which point it's as likely the piles of small creators just do Youtube, rather than figuring out tooling and financials for your new live service instead.

And if your plan is "Aha, we'll kill Youtube too" well you'd better be loaded for bear 'cos that platform is not messing around and the people behind it aren't going to run out of money any time soon.

> Other outfits can probably injure Twitch by poaching key stars, but it's not a path to success for these rival services. The absolute most they can achieve is kill off Twitch, at which point it's as likely the piles of small creators just do Youtube, rather than figuring out tooling and financials for your new live service instead.

Microsoft tried with Mixer, they poached some Twitch stars and shutdown earlier this year. those stars just returned to Twitch.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-07/microsoft...

> And if your plan is "Aha, we'll kill Youtube too" well you'd better be loaded for bear 'cos that platform is not messing around and the people behind it aren't going to run out of money any time soon.

We'll see what happens after the impending antitrust litigation I suppose.

Yeah, and have the uploaders select what they want to save as a more permanent clip.

I believe (I'm not at home in this world at all) the streamers use Twitch for live streaming, then edit (or have employees edit) their sessions into 10-20 minute Youtube videos / series.

Basically, Twitch is losing a LOT of engagement to Youtube because of that.

Its more like 3GB/hour, Twitch maxes out at 6-8 Mbit 1080@60

This is not true anymore. One can stream up to 4k on Twitch.

Is that true for non-partners? I didn't think they allowed a high enough bitrate for 4K.

They don't, for anyone.

You can more or less do whatever resolution you want, but the bitrate limits mean that 1080p is as high as you should go for the vast majority of content.