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.
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, plus “[Rerun]” opening the title and 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
Run it from a rented server.
Rent a small server, put your files on it, and let a script send them straight to Twitch.
Sent straight, without re-encoding, the picture on air stays exactly as it was recorded.
Around that you write the rest yourself: a loop that walks through your playlist, something that relaunches it after a crash, and a way to keep the title and the category in step with what is playing.
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
- A change of format between two VODs breaks the session, and the restart has to land at the right moment
- The seam between two files makes players stall unless it is handled
- 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 keeps the channel on air and restarts the stream 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
Add the raid loop.
The raid pays off when it runs both ways, so neither channel opens cold. Four moments a day carry it.
Going live, the 24/7 channel raids the main one: the first ten minutes open on a room that was already talking. During the live, the replay keeps playing, with a title that points across. When the live ends, raid out to the 24/7 channel, where the chat requests and votes on a VOD. Overnight, the chat programs the channel alone.
The raid in can be automatic. It is off by default and VOD247 turns it on on request. Once on, the 24/7 channel raids the main one after a delay counted from the real start of the live, 60 seconds by default. It raids once per live, at most once an hour, and never itself. It can then pause the 24/7 channel. The raid out, at the end of your stream, stays a button you press.
Twitch documents raids as a built-in feature for sending an audience to another channel, and publishes no rule about raiding a second channel you own. That silence is not a green light.
The rule that does apply sits in the Community Guidelines: artificially inflating follower or viewer counts is prohibited. The line to hold is simple. Never buy viewers, never run bots on either channel, and let the raid move an audience that already exists.
Most 24/7 channels have very few viewers. VOD247 measured it: over the seven days to 2026-10-19, 486 channels were live in the Always On category on average, with 17,846 viewers combined and a median of 2 viewers per channel. That is why the raid loop matters: it brings an audience that already exists instead of waiting for one to find the channel.
Method: VOD247 reads Twitch’s public list of live channels in the Always On category every hour, 821 readings from 2026-09-15 to 2026-10-19. The full dataset is public.
Run this list before the first raid out, not after.
- The second account’s name makes the relationship obvious, usually the main name followed by _247
- Both channels link to each other in their bios and panels
- The replay title and description point at the live while the main channel is on air
- The raid out is part of the end-of-stream routine, pressed by hand
- The raid in is automatic once turned on, and fires in the first minute of the live, not after ten
- No paid viewers and no follow bots on either account, ever
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 in its tags and in every 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