Twitch can be quite an engaging and entertaining platform for gamers, especially the ones who have a huge audience. Many Twitch streamers use different marketing strategies in order to expand their followers’ base and make their videos popular.
That is why marketing services like the Streamupgrade website can be beneficial to fulfill this goal, as they organically increase the number of your followers on a monthly basis. But regardless of Twitch being fun and all, when it comes to community guidelines and rules, it can be slightly strict.
As Twitch greatly discourages bullying and harassment on this platform, it keeps updating its rules. It is also keen to ensure no one violates their music copyright rules, and this also made Twitch change their policy of the “old videos” on this platform.
Twitch Rules for Old Videos
Indeed, it can be a bummer to not be able to see your favorite streamer’s live broadcast. While it’s even worse when you get to see that their broadcast hasn’t been saved, and you entirely missed on the most fabulous moments.
Twitch carried out research, and they noted that most of their storage capacity is affected by the old videos and this compromises its performance. It was also taken into consideration that most of the Twitch archived videos are only watched in the first 14 days after they are saved, whereas, almost no one watched them after this two-week period.
Therefore, Twitch announced in 2014 that it will not keep the archived videos forever. Instead, it will delete the old videos after 14 days for non-paying Twitch members. For Twitch partners or the ones who have connected their account with Amazon Prime video, the old videos will be deleted after 60 days.
Although for paid members the time limit is more, it still won’t keep the videos forever and will instead try to further improve its services. In 2014, Twitch even stated that it will focus more on its “highlights” feature and will provide a more convenient way to upload highlights to YouTube.
Along with this, it made sure that the highlights can be viewed by the international audience at a much better and higher quality to improve user experience. It also allowed its users to watch archived videos on their mobile phones for added convenience.
How to Archive Your Own Broadcasts on Twitch?
If you want your audience to catch up with your missed live stream, you need to manually change the settings accordingly. Otherwise, no one will be able to watch your archived videos for the stated period as mentioned above and they will be deleted immediately. You can archive your own broadcasts as follows:
- Sign in to your Twitch account and click on “settings” from your dashboard.
- Right under “Stream Preferences”, you will be able to tick the “Store Past Broadcasts” box.
Now, it must be kept in mind that checking this “store past broadcast” box doesn’t mean that your old videos will be saved forever. Your audience will be able to view them for the stated period of time and then will be automatically deleted.
You can even share the link of your archived live stream with your followers so more of them are able to keep up with your content without missing anything.
How to Watch Old Archived Videos on Your Own Twitch Channel?
Assuming you have enabled the “store past broadcast” setting for your channel and you want to watch your old broadcasts within the time limit, you can do so by accessing your Twitch channel and finding your old videos right below the “video section”.
How to Watch Old Archived Videos on Someone Else’s Twitch Channel?
If you want to watch your favorite streamer’s old broadcast within the mentioned time period by Twitch, you first need to go to their channel and scroll down until you see the “videos” tab and click on it. You will be able to see the “recent broadcasts” header once you scroll down on this new page, and you can easily watch the old archived videos.
Difference between Twitch Highlights and Clips
Now that you know how to archive your broadcast on Twitch, you must also be wondering how you can save your videos forever, regardless of the rule implemented by Twitch. In order to know this, you should be well aware of the difference between Twitch highlights and clips, as many people tend to mix them up.
Twitch Clips
Twitch clips can be made out of a broadcast for up to 60 seconds only, and it’s important to note that clips can be created by both streamers and the audience. In case one of your followers creates a clip out of your stream, both names (yours and the creator) will be mentioned on it.
The best thing about Twitch clips is that they can serve the purpose of attracting new followers or viewers to your account. You can download, edit and share these clips on your different social media accounts, and it may help you hit your follower target.
Most of the Twitch users have also used Twitch clips to their advantage and needless to say they have contributed greatly to their viewer count. You can share clips of your most amazing moments to attract more followers and entertain your current ones.
Twitch Highlights
Now, you must be wondering how you can possibly save an 8-hour-long stream using the clips feature on Twitch. That’s when the highlight feature comes in handy. You should keep in mind that only the broadcaster can create highlights out of their live stream, as opposed to the clip feature.
A highlight can be up to 2 hours long. Although its main function is to create important and most amusing short highlights in order to give a glimpse to the potential followers of your content and style of streaming, you can still leverage this feature.
For instance, if you want to “save” an 8-hour long live stream on your channel forever, you can create four 2-hour long highlights. It can be a bit of a hassle for your viewers to switch from one video to another while watching a stream, it can still serve the purpose of “saving” your live stream until you decide to delete it.
