Guide

How to rerun Twitch streams on a second channel

By NONSTOPVOD · Updated 2026-10-03

You stream a few hours a day. Your recordings sit unwatched. A second Twitch channel that replays your old streams puts that material back to work: it gives your community something to watch when you are offline, and it gives new viewers a place to meet you before you go live. This guide covers the setup, the labeling, what to schedule and the things that go wrong.

Why a second channel and not your main one

It is tempting to loop your old streams on your main channel while you are away. Most streamers who try it stop. Replays on your main channel mix with your live broadcasts, confuse your followers about when you are really on, muddy your channel's stats, and make your live notifications less meaningful. A separate channel keeps the two clear: the main channel is you, live; the second channel is your back catalog.

The second channel needs a name that says what it is, such as your name plus “replays” or “reruns”, and an About section that says the same in one sentence and points to your main channel. Viewers should never have to guess whether what they are watching is live.

What you need

• A second Twitch account that you control, for the replays.
• Your recordings. VODs from Twitch before they expire (see how to save VODs before they are deleted), or your own local recordings.
• A way to play them as a stream. That is the part that takes effort. See our guide on running a 24/7 stream for the do-it-yourself routes.
• A rule for what plays and when. The easy part to skip, and the one that decides whether the channel is any good.

Step by step

1. Create the second channel. Name it clearly, add a profile picture that matches your main one, and write the About section before you go live.
2. Gather and check the material. Watch the first minute and the last minute of each recording. Look for stream-ending problems, long silent stretches before you start, and anything you would not want repeated.
3. Make the material uniform. The same resolution, frame rate and audio settings across files avoids glitches at the seams. If you stream with the same settings every time, you may already have this.
4. Set up the playback. OBS with a playlist, a small server running ffmpeg, or a hosted service.
5. Set the title. Include the word rerun or replay, and the original stream's date or topic if you can.
6. Go live and watch it for a day. Check the transitions, the audio levels and what chat sees.
7. Plan the maintenance. New streams should join the pool automatically, or at least on a weekly habit.

Labeling reruns

Say what it is. A title like “REPLAY: the full Dark Souls run, 3 June” is honest and still clickable, and viewers should never have to guess whether what they are watching is live.

What to schedule

A pile of recordings is not a schedule. A few ideas that tend to work:

• Variety. Alternate games or series instead of playing five Elden Ring streams in a row, even if they are in order.
• No repeats too close together. If you have 200 hours of recordings, a viewer who returns tomorrow should not see the same stream.
• The best material at the best times. If you know when your audience is online, put your strongest streams there.
• Themed blocks. A “Saturday night horror” block gives people a reason to come back at a time.
• Fresh streams soon. A replay of last week's stream while the news is still fresh is more interesting than one from three years ago.

Doing this by hand every week is the reason most replay channels fall over. A good setup builds the schedule from your archive on its own and lets you reorder or skip things without restarting the stream.

The audio problem

Twitch mutes parts of past broadcasts where its systems detect copyrighted music. In a replay, silence in the middle of a stream is jarring. Either cut those sections, cover them with music you have the rights to, or accept the silence. We explain the options in our muted VOD audio guide.

Doing it with NONSTOPVOD

NONSTOPVOD is built for exactly this. You connect your main channel, and it copies your VODs as they arrive. You connect the second channel for the replays. It builds a schedule that avoids repeats, plays the recordings as they were without re-encoding, and fills the muted ranges with a track you chose. Replays run on the separate channel, never on your live one, and the titles are labeled as reruns. You can reorder the queue, skip an item, or let the chat bot handle simple commands from your viewers while you are away.

It is not the only way to do this, and if you want to build it yourself, the other guides on this site explain how. The free test mode lets you try 30-minute replay sessions on your own channel before you decide. Plans are on the home page.

Common mistakes

• Streaming replays on the main channel.
• Forgetting to label them.
• Letting the archive stop growing, so the replay channel shows the same pool for months.
• Never watching your own replay channel. Watch it live once a week.
• Ignoring the second channel's chat. Even a replay channel has viewers, and a few friendly replies go a long way.