What a 24/7 channel is.
A 24/7 channel is a Twitch account that is live all the time, playing recorded video instead of a camera.
Almost every one of them uses two accounts. The replay channel broadcasts, and the source channel is where the content came from.
The demo channel anyme_24_7 replays the archive of anyme023. Two logins, one library, one directory listing.
Splitting the two matters. Your main channel keeps its history, its clips and its schedule, and the replay never lands on it.
Why streamers run one.
Three reasons come up every time, and none of them is about watch hours.
The first is the directory. An offline channel appears nowhere on Twitch, and a replay channel sits in a category all night.
The second is the raid. When your main stream ends, you send the room somewhere instead of closing the tab.
The third is the archive. Twitch deletes past broadcasts on a timer, and a replay channel gives you a reason to keep them.
- 7 days of retention for a standard account
- 14 days for an Affiliate
- 60 days for a Partner, Prime or Turbo account
Check these before you start.
Four things decide whether the channel survives its first month. None of them is technical.
Label the content as a replay. Twitch’s help page asks for the Rerun checkbox, “[Rerun]” at the start of the title and in the go-live notification. VOD247 puts the tags Rediffusion and replay on the channel and writes the mention at the front of every title.
Own what you play. A channel may replay its own broadcasts, or those of a source that gave it a written licence, and nothing else.
Do not build the channel around drops. Read the Community Guidelines before you point a 24/7 account at a drops campaign.
And expect the audio to stay as it is. A segment Twitch muted on the original broadcast comes back muted on the replay.
Four ways to stay on air.
They are ordered by effort. The first costs nothing and asks the most of you, the last asks almost nothing.
Read the breaking point of each one before you pick. That is where your evenings go.
Loop files in OBS.
Add a VLC Video Source to a scene, drop your exported broadcasts into its playlist, tick loop, and start streaming.
A Media Source also works for a single file. VLC Video Source is the one that takes a list and plays it in order.
It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it is where most people start.
- Your PC stays on and encoding, day and night
- Your upload is busy, so playing anything else degrades the stream
- A crash, an update or a power cut ends the broadcast
- Nothing follows the video: title, category and chat stay manual
Use a playlist service.
Restream, Streamlabs and similar tools host a scheduler in the browser and stream your uploads for you.
They do the hardest part well: the machine at home goes off, and the stream stays up without you.
Where they stop is the library. You upload files by hand, inside a storage cap, and nothing reads your Twitch archive.
- Every broadcast is exported, then uploaded, one by one
- Storage caps decide how much of your archive fits
- No import from Twitch, so an expiring VOD is your problem
- The chat watches, and never chooses
Script ffmpeg on a server.
Rent a small server, put your files on it, and let ffmpeg push them straight to Twitch.
The core command is short: ffmpeg -re -i file.mp4 -c copy -f flv rtmp://live.twitch.tv/app/YOUR-KEY. The -c copy part matters, because it sends the file without re-encoding.
Wrap it in a shell loop over a playlist file, run it under systemd so it restarts, and call the Helix API to set title and category.
Add a chat bot if you want the room to interact. That is a second service to write and keep alive.
This is the method that actually works. It is also a small piece of software you now maintain.
- The 48-hour cap: you have to reconnect on purpose, between two files
- Format changes between VODs break a copy session, so ffmpeg has to restart at the right moment
- Timestamps reset at every file, and players hate that
- Downloads have to happen before the retention window closes
- Storage, bandwidth and the monthly bill are yours
Let hosted playout run it.
VOD247 does the same four jobs on its own servers, keyed to your channel.
It archives each new VOD at full quality before it expires, keeps the file as Twitch stored it, and queues what plays next.
It holds one RTMP session and recycles it around every 12 hours, between two VODs, never inside one.
And it opens a vote. Requests open 20 minutes before the end, a poll of 5 options follows, the winner is queued.
You authorize two Twitch accounts. VOD247 handles the rest.
- No re-encoding, so the replay looks like the original stream
- Title, category and replay tags follow the VOD on air
- Without Affiliate status the bot counts !vote 1-5 in chat instead of a native poll
- A public channel site lists the catalogue, the history and the current vote
Before you go live.
Run this list once. Most channels that fail in week one skipped two of these lines.
- A second Twitch account exists, with its own stream key
- The replay is labelled: tags Rediffusion and replay, and the mention in the title
- The source is declared, and you own the content or hold a written licence
- The chat bot is VIP or moderator, or its messages disappear in followers-only mode
- Muted segments are reviewed, and the risky VODs are excluded from the queue
- The first 48 hours are watched, because that is when the cap and the reconnect show up