Is a 24/7 Rerun Channel Against the Rules?

This is the question people ask before the technical one, and it gets answered badly almost everywhere — usually with "it depends" or a confident guess.

The real answer is that the three platforms disagree with each other, and one of them says something most people get wrong.

Here is what each actually allows, quoted from their own documentation.

Short version

Looping your own content 24/7
YouTubeAllowed. The most permissive of the three.
TwitchAllowed, with three costs people don't expect.
KickAllowed to stream — but it can cost you Partner status.

Kick: the one that surprises people

Kick's own help centre lists grounds for revoking or refusing verification and the Partner programme. Among them:

"Avoid mirror streams, blank streams, or pre-recorded content."

It also expects channels to carry genuine VOD content so viewers can catch up on streams they missed.

So: nothing stops you from running a loop on Kick. But if your plan includes getting verified or becoming a Kick Partner, a channel built on pre-recorded content works against you.

We are telling you this on a page published by a company whose product streams to Kick. If a 24/7 Kick channel is the whole reason you were considering a tool like ours, this is the paragraph you needed before paying anyone.

Twitch: allowed, but it costs you three things

Twitch permits pre-recorded content. You can loop material you own or are licensed to use, and the platform provides a rerun feature for exactly this.

But three things catch people out.

1. Reruns are capped at 720p. Whatever you upload, whatever your bitrate, a Twitch rerun does not go out in 1080p. If picture quality is the point of your channel, this is a hard ceiling.

2. You need Affiliate status first. The rerun feature is not available to a brand-new channel. As of 2026 the Affiliate requirements are 25 followers plus, within a rolling 30-day window, 4 hours streamed across 4 different days with an average of 3 concurrent viewers — lowered from the older 50 followers / 8 hours / 7 days that most guides still quote.

⚠️ These thresholds have changed more than once, and most pages you will find are out of date. Check Twitch's own Affiliate page before planning around them.

3. Rerun hours reportedly do not count toward ongoing eligibility. Several community sources report that Twitch does not count rerun hours toward the baselines it measures for continued Affiliate or Partner status.

⚠️ We could not confirm this on a Twitch-owned page. Treat it as likely but unverified, and do not build a monetisation plan on rerun hours alone.

And separately, the 48-hour cut applies to reruns too. Twitch ends every continuous broadcast at exactly 48 hours, rerun or not. We wrote that up here: the Twitch 48-hour limit.

YouTube: the most permissive, with one rule that matters

YouTube places no maximum length on a broadcast, and nothing in its policies forbids streaming pre-recorded video as live.

The rule that matters is about whose content it is. YouTube's monetisation policies define reused content as:

"content that is not clearly your own original creation. It may already be on YouTube or another online source, and have no added significant original commentary, substantive modifications, or educational or entertainment value."

Looping your own footage — your music, your gameplay, your archive, your footage — is not reused content. Looping someone else's, or mass-producing near-identical channels from a template, is exactly what the policy targets. The penalty is monetisation being turned off, and YouTube states it can apply across all of your channels.

One more thing specific to always-on channels, and it is not a policy but a mechanic: a stream longer than 12 hours may not be archived at all, so a 24/7 channel produces no VOD. We covered that, and the workaround, here: 24/7 on YouTube without OBS.

The thing that actually kills these channels

It is not the rules about pre-recorded content. It is the music.

A looping channel plays the same audio thousands of times. If one track in that loop is claimable, you are not generating one copyright claim — you are generating a claim every single time the loop comes round, on a channel nobody is watching at 4am.

This is the single most common way a 24/7 channel dies, and no service in this category — including ours — scans your file for claimable audio before you loop it. You have to be certain about your own soundtrack.

If you are not certain, the safest options are music you produced, music with a written broadcast licence that explicitly covers continuous streaming, or no music at all.

We went through what the licensing libraries actually say, in their own words: music on a 24/7 stream.

So what can you actually run?

Based on the above, the channels least likely to cause you trouble are the ones built on material you made:

And the ones most likely to cause trouble:

Where we come in

PulseCast loops your file 24/7 from the cloud to YouTube, Twitch, Kick or any RTMP destination. Upload once, paste a stream key, done — no PC left on, no OBS.

We do not check your content rights or your soundtrack, and no competitor does either. That part is yours.

From $19/month. The free plan is 48 hours of streaming at 720p with a watermark — enough to test it, not a permanent free tier. We also published an honest comparison of 12 services including ours, which says plainly where competitors are cheaper than we are.

Sources

Kick's grounds for refusing verification and Partner status: help.kick.com. YouTube's reused content definition and enforcement: YouTube channel monetisation policies, support.google.com. Twitch rerun behaviour and Affiliate requirements: Twitch help pages and community documentation — the two claims we could not confirm on a Twitch-owned page are flagged inline above.

Something wrong or out of date? Tell us: pulsecast.tv@icloud.com

PulseCast loops your own file to any of the three. See what it costs