Facebook is downsizing data storage expenditures by deleting old live video feeds. Meta Platforms announced that beginning this week “new live broadcasts can be replayed, downloaded or shared from Facebook Pages or profiles for 30 days, after which they will be automatically removed from Facebook.” Prior to removing the content, users will be notified they have 90 days to download or transfer the material to other storage or convert it to a new reel. Previously, such content was stored indefinitely. Facebook stores more than 100 petabytes of material with an estimated 500 terabytes added each day.

TechCrunch points out that Amazon’s Twitch, one of Facebook Live’s biggest competitors, “stores past broadcasts for 60 days for Twitch Partners, Affiliates, and Prime streamers” and “for regular streamers, the platform stores past live videos for 14 days.”

YouTube, another storage destination for live videos, houses broadcasts “indefinitely by converting them into regular videos (unless a user has chosen to disable archiving),” TechCrunch notes.

In a news post, Meta said the change aligns Facebook’s storage policies “with industry standards and helps ensure we are providing the most up-to-date live video experiences for everyone on Facebook.” The company is also offering an option to postpone deletion for an extra six months for those who need more time to offload the material.

“Meta’s crunched the numbers and found that no one’s watching live streams that are more than a month old, so rather than continuing to support these videos in perpetuity, it’s now putting an end time on them and deleting them from its servers,” Social Media Today reports, suggesting the move “makes sense.”

“Storing long videos is expensive, and Meta has already made several changes over time to rationalize its approach,” writes Social Media Today. With plans “to spend around $65 billion on AI development this year, it needs to trim the budget where it can.”

The Verge spells out a number of download tools offered by Facebook for video archiving, “either individually or all at once,” detailing that “once you get the notification, you can request a bulk download of all your videos within a custom date range” or “could also choose to transfer the videos directly to a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive.”