24/7 Streaming Services Compared

Last verified: September 2026

Every comparison of these tools is written by one of the vendors. This one is too — we make PulseCast. So we have done the one thing those pages never do: we have included where we lose.

All prices below come from each vendor's own pricing page, checked in September 2026. Where a vendor publishes contradictory prices in two places, we say so.

What it costs to run ONE channel, 24/7, for a month

Streamloop is the cheapest, and it is not close. If price is your only criterion and you stream to one platform, stop reading and go there.

Several of the services above send to more than one platform at once — and Twitch attaches conditions to that which most write-ups get wrong: the rules for streaming to YouTube, Twitch and Kick together.

One thing worth noticing: at most vendors, 720p and 1080p cost exactly the same. You are not paying for resolution. You are paying for permission to run without a duration cap.

The limits that are not on the pricing page

These are the things people discover in month two. Each is quoted from the vendor's own documentation.

Restream — cannot do 24/7 at all

"You can loop your video up to 10 times."

"You can stream a maximum of a 40-hour stream with looping."

"Currently, our playlists don't support looping."

"we suggest restarting your stream every 24 hours."

Looping requires the Marathon add-on at $79/mo. Back-to-back playlists get "a 2-minute buffer in between" — roughly an hour of dead air per month. Disconnect protection is Business-tier only, and it plays a fallback video: if you do not reconnect within your chosen window, "your stream will end on the destination platforms."

Castr — infinite loop starts at $199.99/mo

Starter and Standard both list "Playout loop mode: – Not included" and "Infinite loop: – Not included." Starter also caps you at 5 files, 500 MB per file, 30 minutes maximum duration.

Even on Premium, "Maximum loop days: 15 days" (Ultra: 30).

And the bandwidth is sold as an annual pool, not a monthly one — which produced this Trustpilot review, 15 April 2026:

"the website stated it included 36 TB of bandwidth. What was not made clear is that this number is annualized. […] I received no notification until I was already 6 TB over."

Gyre — no playlists on the $49 tier

Start ($49/mo) marks both playlists and the stream scheduler as "–". You get one file, one stream.

Their trial converts automatically:

"If you don't cancel your Trial subscription by the 7th day, you'll be automatically upgraded to a paid Start+ subscription."

And upgrading destroys your data:

"your current server will be replaced. Save any critical data first, as existing files and streams will be lost."

Refunds only "within 14 days of payment and have streamed less than 10 hours."

OneStream Live — YouTube only, 30-day ceiling, no 4K

"24-Hour streaming — Only available for YouTube."

The add-on is $30/mo on top of your plan and is "One video per stream" — no playlist inside the 24/7 mode. It "will run for a maximum of 30 days in one go." There is no 4K on any tier. And, in their own capitals:

"REFUNDS WILL NOT BE PROVIDED FOR ANY SUBSCRIPTION."

Upstream — the free plan is 24 hours per month

Not 24/7. 24 hours, total, per month. The $30 tier covers one concurrent stream; 4K and 60fps are priced upgrades.

In fairness: our own free plan is 48 hours once, watermarked — tighter than theirs. Upstream's 24 hours refresh every month. Over a year, theirs is far more generous than ours.

LiveReacting — the $250 plan cannot do what the $40 plan does

Duration is the upsell lever: Free 0.5h, Small 1h, Medium 3h, Large 8h, and Enterprise ($249.99/mo) still caps at 24h. Only the separate "24/7 Streaming" SKU at $39.99/mo has unlimited duration.

YoloCast — 1080p ceiling, playlist locks once live

Looping is Business ($99/mo) only. No 4K at any price. Playlist capped at 10 videos, and the order locks when you go live: "You cannot skip ahead, play them out of order, or insert a new episode mid-stream."

Streamloop — no multi-destination

Their FAQ:

"Can I stream to multiple platforms at once? Not yet, but multi-destination streaming is on our roadmap."

Also: if your credits reach zero mid-stream, "the stream stops automatically."

playout.video — publishes two different price lists

Homepage says $39/$79/$199 monthly. Help center says $29/$49/$149. Both were live in September 2026. The annual figures agree ($19/$39/$119).

Where PulseCast loses

Streamloop is cheaper than us. Substantially. $7.99/month for 1080p against our $29 Pro tier. If you run one channel to one platform and cost is what matters, they win and we will not pretend otherwise.

Castr, Wowza and StreamPush do things we do not — SCTE-35 ad insertion, enterprise SLAs, rights-holder workflows, transcoding ladders. If you need those, you are not our customer.

Our free plan is the tightest in this table. 48 hours once, 720p, watermarked. Several services here give you more before asking for money.

We cap at 1080p. No 4K. Several vendors above will sell you 4K today.

We are new and small. Upstream has years of reviews. We have a product that has been running since 22 August 2026 and a founder who answers his own email.

The thing nobody in this table does

Across every service in this table, the most common complaint is not price and not features. It is this:

"the dashboard can tell you that you are 'streaming' when in fact you are not."

— Restream customer, G2

"Other times it will say it's live-streaming, but it actually not."

— Castr customer, G2, May 2026

"Streams randomly go offline, and when I reached out to figure out why, I checked directly with YouTube first. YouTube confirmed there was nothing wrong on their end."

— Upstream customer, Trustpilot, 3 September 2026

"Love the price. Hate the unexplained disconnects."

— Upstream customer, Trustpilot, 15 August 2026

Nor does any of them check your soundtrack before you put it on a permanent loop — the way most of these channels actually die.

Not one service in this comparison sends you a notification when your stream dies. Restream's disconnect protection sits at the $239/mo tier and still has no push, SMS, email or webhook alerting.

For a channel that is supposed to run unattended, this is the defect that matters. Your stream can be down for nine hours and the only way you find out is by looking.

Why Twitch channels die at exactly 48 hours

From Twitch's own broadcasting guidelines:

"The maximum broadcast length is 48 hours. This cannot be changed."

There is no warning, and nothing appears in your dashboard. The ingest simply ends. If your encoder keeps pushing, it reconnects as a new broadcast — if it notices.

This is why most 24/7 Twitch attempts quietly stop working around day two. OBS does not reliably detect it. From the OBS forums, March 2025:

"On the OBS side, it appears as if I'm still streaming, but when viewing the channel on Twitch, it's clearly down. I have to then manually intervene — if I notice it didn't reconnect, which may take awhile."

That thread has zero replies.

Only two services in this comparison advertise handling it: Upstream, which states it restarts the stream before the 48h mark, and PulseCast, which reconnects automatically in about 6 seconds.

Before picking any of them, it is worth knowing what each platform permits: is a 24/7 rerun channel against the rules? — Twitch, Kick and YouTube do not agree, and one of them is not what people assume.

We wrote up both reasons 24/7 Twitch channels fail, with the ffmpeg commands to fix them yourself.

There is also a free option, and you should know about it

Stream Control Center is an open-source tool that does playlists, scheduling, 48-hour auto-restart, Twitch/Kick/YouTube with OAuth, overlays and a chat bot. Download, run setup.bat, open localhost:5000.

The honest caveats: it is alpha, the author says do not use your main Twitch account for testing, the interface is German-only, and it runs on your machine — so your PC still has to stay on, which is the problem most people came here to solve.

If you are technical and have a machine you leave running, it is a real option and it costs nothing.

If YouTube is your platform, you do not even need that tool: we wrote up how to run a 24/7 YouTube channel without OBS, with the ffmpeg commands and the four things that actually kill these channels.

What we measured on our own channels

From 22 August to 17 September 2026 we ran three channels continuously — YouTube, Twitch and Kick — on the same infrastructure we sell. We have since switched them off: they were our own marketing loop playing to almost nobody, and we would rather spend the bandwidth on a customer's channel than on our own advertisement.

What we measured while they ran:

We would rather tell you we turned them off than leave you clicking dead links. Send us a file and we will put your own material on a live channel so you can judge it properly.

Sources

Every price above was read from the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. Customer quotes come from G2, Capterra and Trustpilot, with dates attached. Twitch's 48-hour limit is from help.twitch.tv. The OBS quote is from obsproject.com/forum.

Prices change. If you find something here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it — pulsecast.tv@icloud.com

PulseCast is one of the twelve. See what it costs