A 24/7 Twitch stream keeps your channel live while you sleep, replaying your own back catalogue between sessions. Twitch caps one broadcast at 48 hours, so the whole trick is the restart. This guide covers what Twitch allows, how the 48-hour limit actually behaves, and three ways to build an always-on channel, from a free OBS setup to a hosted playout that needs no machine of your own.
Last verified: 19 August 2026. Platform rules change. Where this page states a Twitch policy, check it against Twitch's Terms of Service and Community Guidelines before you build on it.
24/7 stream, 24-hour marathon, rerun: three different things
The terms get used interchangeably and they are not the same, which matters because Twitch treats them differently.
| Format | What it is | Who is at the keyboard | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24-hour marathon | One live session, usually a charity drive or a milestone | You, awake, for a full day | 24 hours, once |
| Rerun | A past broadcast replayed, labelled as a rerun | Nobody | Length of the VOD |
| 24/7 always-on channel | A continuous schedule of your own content, with live sessions dropped in on top | Nobody, most of the time | Indefinite, restarted every 48 hours |
An always-on channel is the only one of the three that keeps a channel page warm permanently. That is the point of it: your channel is never a dark thumbnail in someone's following list.
Is 24/7 streaming allowed on Twitch?
Yes, with three conditions that are worth being precise about.
The content has to be yours or licensed to you. Replaying your own VODs, your own edits, your own footage is fine. Restreaming somebody else's broadcast, a film, a sports feed or a music video you do not hold rights to is rebroadcasting, and that is what gets channels struck down. This is the rule that actually ends 24/7 channels, far more often than the technical ones.
Pre-recorded content should be labelled. Twitch provides a rerun designation for exactly this case. Running old content under a live banner while a viewer thinks you are in chat is the behaviour that draws reports.
Everything else in the Community Guidelines still applies, and it applies to the whole 48 hours, not just the part you were watching. A clip that would get you a strike live gets you the same strike at 04:00 with no moderators awake.
The 48-hour limit, and what actually happens when you hit it
Twitch caps a single continuous broadcast at 48 hours. You do not get a warning dialog. The ingest simply ends, and if your encoder is still pushing, it reconnects as a new broadcast.
In practice this is less dramatic than it sounds, because it is the encoder's problem, not the channel's. Your channel does not lose its followers, its schedule or its position. What you lose is the continuity of one VOD, and roughly the handful of seconds it takes the new session to come up.
There are two ways to deal with it:
- Let it reconnect. OBS and most encoders will retry automatically. The stream comes back as a fresh broadcast. This is the zero-effort option and it is what most always-on channels do.
- Restart it deliberately, at a quiet hour. Schedule the stop and start yourself so the seam lands at 05:00 rather than in the middle of your peak. On macOS or Linux this is a cron job driving obs-websocket. Two calls, StopStream and StartStream, thirty seconds apart.
Either way, the source of the video should not restart. Only the delivery to Twitch does. That is the architectural point of the setups below: the playout keeps running, and only the pipe to Twitch is recycled.
Three ways to build an always-on channel
| Route | What you need | Runs when your machine is off | Cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OBS playlist | OBS, a folder of files | No | Free | Trying the idea out |
| App playout plus OBS capture | A Mac left running, My TV Channel, OBS | No | App subscription | A real schedule you control, at home |
| Hosted playout | Nothing local | Yes | Hosted plan | A channel that must not depend on your electricity |
Route 1: the OBS-only version, and why people outgrow it
OBS can loop a VLC Video Source pointed at a folder. It works, it costs nothing, and it is the right first step.
What people run into is that a folder is not a schedule. There is no way to say "this twice as often as that", no way to put a block on weekday mornings, no way to see what is playing in two hours, and no clean handling of files with different resolutions and frame rates, which is where the stuttering at every transition comes from. You also cannot change anything without touching the machine.
Route 2: app playout, captured to Twitch with OBS
This is the setup most people land on. A playout app builds and runs the schedule; OBS does nothing but capture the window and push RTMP.
My TV Channel turns an iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android device or Roku into a channel. For the Twitch workflow specifically you want the Mac, because that is where the capture happens.
Step 1. Build the channel. Create it in the app, then add videos from Photos, from Files, or by importing a URL. You need at least 4 videos and 15 minutes of total running time before a channel can go live. Each video gets a weight from 0 to 10. Higher weight plays more often; weight 0 pulls it out of rotation without deleting it.
Step 2. Choose the scheduling mode. Weighted random generates a rolling 7-day grid automatically and regenerates when you add content, which is what you want for a channel nobody is babysitting. On macOS, the Studio tab adds a visual timeline: drag videos into specific slots, drop a block of episodes in sequence, and watch the grid update live. Use weighted random for the bulk of the day and the timeline for the parts you care about.
Step 3. Capture it into OBS. In OBS, add a macOS Screen Capture source, switch it to Window Capture, and select the My TV Channel window. Crop to the video area. In Settings, Stream, pick Twitch and paste the stream key from your Creator Dashboard under Settings, Stream.
Step 4. Set output that Twitch will actually accept. 1080p60 at 6000 kbps, or 720p60 at 4500 kbps if your upload is tight. Keyframe interval 2 seconds, x264 or hardware encoder, profile High. Do not send a keyframe interval of 0 or "auto": Twitch wants a fixed 2-second GOP and an auto value is the most common cause of the "keyframes are not being sent often enough" warning.
Step 5. Route the audio silently. OBS picks up the window's audio. If you do not want the Mac making noise for two years, install a virtual audio device such as BlackHole, send My TV Channel's output to it, and add it as an OBS audio source. The stream carries sound; the room does not.
Route 3: hosted playout, when the channel matters more than the hardware
Everything above depends on a machine in your home staying awake, online and unlocked. That is fine until a power cut, a system update or a roommate ends a channel that took a year to build.
The alternative is to run the playout server-side and treat Twitch as one output among several. The schedule lives in the cloud, the encoding is done once, and the same channel can be pushed to Twitch, embedded on a site, and shipped to Apple TV, Android TV and Roku at the same time. Nothing in your house has to be switched on. That is the model behind iReplay's VOD2Live playout, and it is the right answer once the channel is worth more to you than the cost of not running it yourself.
What an always-on channel actually does for a channel
Two effects, and it is worth being honest that only one of them is large.
Discovery, modest but real. A live channel appears in category listings and in followers' live lists. An offline channel appears nowhere. For a small channel, being permanently present in a quiet category at 03:00 is a genuinely different proposition from being absent 20 hours a day.
Back catalogue reuse, large. Most of your viewers have seen almost none of your old broadcasts. Twitch is not built for browsing an archive; nobody scrolls to your VOD from eight months ago. A 24/7 channel is the only mechanism on the platform that puts old work back in front of people, continuously, with no effort per view.
What it does not do is manufacture a community. Chat in an unattended channel is quiet, and viewers work out very quickly that nobody is home. Always-on works as a floor under a channel, not as a substitute for streaming.
Reliability checklist
- Wired network. Ethernet, not Wi-Fi. A 24/7 stream will find every dropout your Wi-Fi has, and it will find them at night.
- Upload headroom. Take your target bitrate and double it. 6000 kbps of video wants 12 Mbps of upload to survive the rest of the household.
- Disable sleep and screen lock. System Settings, then Energy. A window capture of a locked screen is a black rectangle, and Twitch will happily broadcast it for eleven hours.
- Watch it from outside. Open your own channel on a phone on mobile data once a day. Half of all silent failures look perfectly fine on the machine that is producing them.
- Cap the restart damage. Schedule the 48-hour recycle at your quietest hour rather than letting it land at random.
Frequently asked questions
Is 24/7 streaming against Twitch's rules?
No. Running a continuous channel of content you own or are licensed to use is allowed. What is not allowed is rebroadcasting content you do not hold rights to, and presenting pre-recorded material in a way designed to make viewers believe you are live and present. Label reruns as reruns.
What is the Twitch 48-hour limit?
Twitch ends a single continuous broadcast after 48 hours. Your encoder reconnects as a new broadcast, so the channel stays live; you lose only the continuity of that one VOD and a few seconds of air. You can automate a clean stop and start with obs-websocket so the seam lands at a quiet hour.
Can you get banned for a 24/7 stream?
Not for the format itself. Channels get actioned for what is in the content: unlicensed music, films, sports feeds, other people's broadcasts, or guideline breaches that sit unmoderated overnight. If everything in rotation is yours and would pass live, an always-on schedule adds no new risk.
Do 24/7 streams make money on Twitch?
They can accumulate ad revenue and subscriptions, but the numbers are usually small: unattended channels convert far worse than live ones. Treat the revenue as incidental and the audience retention as the reason to do it.
Do you need a dedicated computer for a 24/7 Twitch stream?
For the OBS capture route, yes: something has to stay awake and online, and a Mac mini is the usual answer. For a hosted playout the schedule and encoding run server-side, so nothing at home needs to be switched on.
Can you run a 24/7 stream from a phone?
You can build and run the channel on an iPhone or Android device, but pushing it to Twitch continuously from a phone is not practical: thermals, background limits and mobile networks all work against you. Build on the phone, broadcast from a Mac or from a hosted playout.
Where to start
If you have never run one, start with Route 1 for a weekend and find out whether an always-on channel changes anything for your numbers. If it does, move to Route 2 so you get a real schedule instead of a folder. Move to Route 3 the moment the channel matters enough that a power cut would upset you.
The one decision worth making early is the content rule: only put things in rotation that you would be comfortable having on air, unattended, in front of a stranger, at four in the morning. Every 24/7 channel that ends badly ends there.