Why Most Live Streams Won't Exist in 30 Days
The streaming industry generated roughly $78 billion in 2025 and around $100 billion in 2024, depending on whose methodology you trust. Nearly 29% of internet users worldwide tune in to live streams every week. Viewers collectively watched 29.6 billion hours of live content in a single quarter last year. By every meaningful measure, live streaming has become one of the most significant content formats on the internet.
And most of it will be gone within a month. (We track the platform-level data behind these figures at streamrecorder.io/research/streaming-platform-statistics/, with 65+ individually sourced statistics updated regularly.)
That's not a rhetorical exaggeration. It's the logical outcome of how every major platform handles live content after the broadcast ends. The industry has built an enormous, fast-growing ecosystem around real-time video, and it sits on top of an archival infrastructure that is, to put it politely, almost nonexistent.
The Retention Gap
Each platform approaches post-broadcast storage differently, but the consistent theme is impermanence.
Twitch auto-deletes VODs after 14 days for most creators, extending to 60 days for Partners and Turbo subscribers. In early 2025, the platform introduced a 100-hour cap on Highlights and Uploads, the primary workaround creators had used for long-term archival. Content exceeding the cap gets deleted automatically, starting with the least-viewed material. The community backlash was significant, but the cap remains in place.
Instagram Live vanishes the moment a broadcast ends unless the creator manually shares a replay. Most don't. The default outcome is permanent deletion.
TikTok Live, now the second-largest live streaming platform globally, with well over 35 billion hours watched across 2025, saves nothing by default. When a TikTok Live ends, the content exists only in whatever screen recordings individual viewers happened to capture.
YouTube Live is the exception that proves the rule. Streams are saved automatically as channel uploads. But creators can and do delete them, YouTube's copyright system can restrict or remove them retroactively, and the platform's own algorithmic deprioritization of older live content means most streams effectively disappear from discoverability even when the file technically persists.
The result is an industry-wide retention gap. Billions of hours of content are created, consumed in real time, and then quietly discarded. The platforms themselves treat this as a feature, not a bug. Storage costs money. Old streams generate minimal ad revenue. The economic incentive is to optimize for the next live broadcast, not to preserve the last one.
Why This Matters Beyond Entertainment
If live streaming were purely an entertainment medium, the archival question would be a niche concern. But the use cases for live video have expanded well beyond gaming and lifestyle content, and the impermanence of live streams now creates real problems for industries that depend on this content.
Journalism is the most obvious example. When a public figure makes statements during a live broadcast, that stream may be the only record of what was said. If the platform doesn't preserve it and nobody recorded it externally, the primary source material simply ceases to exist. OSINT researchers face the same problem. Investigators who need to reference live content from conflict zones, protests, or breaking events are working against deletion clocks they often can't see.
Education is another area where the gap has practical consequences. Universities, conference organizers, and workshop instructors increasingly use live streaming for remote delivery, but many choose platforms with no native archival. A lecture streamed on Instagram Live or TikTok is gone the moment it ends unless someone planned ahead.
Live commerce, which has become a multi-billion dollar channel particularly in Southeast Asian markets, generates content that businesses need for compliance, quality assurance, and repurposing into marketing assets. None of the major social platforms archive this content by default.
And then there's the creator economy itself. The standard workflow for a working creator in 2026 involves going live once, then slicing that stream into dozens of clips for TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and X. The long-form live session is the raw material that feeds an entire content pipeline. Lose the recording and you lose the source material for weeks of short-form output.
Fragmentation Compounds the Problem
Platform fragmentation has accelerated sharply over the past two years, and it makes the archival challenge substantially worse.
YouTube Live, TikTok Live, and Twitch alone account for over 93% of total livestream viewership, with Kick growing fast behind them as the clear fourth major platform. But the competitive dynamics look completely different depending on region and content category. Twitch still commands around 54% of gaming-specific hours watched as of Q2 2025. TikTok Live dominates IRL and mobile commerce content. YouTube leads in aggregate across all categories. Kick is growing at over 130% year over year for the full year, driven by its 95/5 revenue split.
Regionally, the differences are even starker. Asia Pacific represents the largest share of the global live streaming market and is growing the fastest. The Middle East and Africa are close behind, driven by mobile-first consumption and sports content. Latin American viewers have historically gravitated toward Facebook Gaming (now defunct) and YouTube Live more heavily than toward Twitch.
For anyone trying to preserve live content across this landscape, each platform represents a separate archival problem with different retention policies, different API access, and different technical constraints. A creator who multistreams to Twitch and YouTube simultaneously, which has become common practice since exclusivity requirements relaxed, has to manage two entirely separate storage timelines. Add TikTok Live or Kick to the mix and the complexity multiplies further.
There's no unified standard, no interoperable archival layer, and no industry consensus that content preservation is even a priority. Each platform makes independent storage decisions based on its own cost structure, and the trend line points toward more restrictions, not fewer.
An Infrastructure Problem, Not a Feature Request
I run StreamRecorder.io, so I'm not a neutral observer on this topic. But I also think the framing matters. Content preservation for live streaming is not a feature request for individual platforms to address. It's an infrastructure gap in the broader streaming ecosystem.
The industry has invested enormously in reducing latency, improving encoding efficiency, scaling concurrent viewer capacity, and building sophisticated ad-insertion pipelines. Those are legitimate infrastructure priorities. But the assumption underlying all of them is that live content only has value while it's live. That assumption is increasingly wrong.
The average live streaming session lasts around 25 minutes, and viewers can spend up to 8x longer watching live video compared to on-demand content. That watch-time intensity is what makes live content valuable. The content retains informational, cultural, and commercial value well beyond its initial airing.
The streaming industry built the pipes to deliver live content at scale. What it hasn't built, and what third-party tools are now filling by necessity, is the infrastructure to ensure that content still exists 30 days later.
Given the trajectory of the market, projected to exceed $345 billion worldwide by 2030, that gap is only going to widen. The volume of live content is growing. The platforms' willingness to store it indefinitely is shrinking. And the number of industries that depend on accessing live content after the fact is expanding.
Something has to give. The question is whether the platforms themselves will address it, or whether content preservation remains an afterthought that the rest of the ecosystem has to solve independently.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from StreamRecorder.io. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]