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How to Save Twitch Streams in 3 Steps

Live streaming on Twitch continues to grow more popular every year. Over 30 million daily active users now tune in to watch their favorite streamers play games, chat with their communities, participate in marathons for charity, and more.

But what happens when those live streams end? Without saving your broadcasts, all that unique content could disappear forever once you go offline.

Fortunately, Twitch provides broadcasters several handy tools to archive their streams. Read on to learn how to easily save Twitch streams in only 3 steps.

Why Save Your Streams?

Before jumping into the how-to, understanding the incentives can motivate you to archive your broadcasts more consistently:

  • Share highlights and clips: Rather than letting epic gaming moments or funny conversation tidbits fade away, saving streams lets you extract highlights to post on other social platforms. This helps you expand your audience.

  • Build a content library: Streaming several times per week means you’re producing a ton of content. Saving it to reference later can be invaluable.

  • Allow fans to catch up: Your most dedicated viewers will appreciate the ability to watch streams they missed. It strengthens their investment in your channel.

  • Monitor your metrics: Reviewing past broadcasts lets you study what stream styles, games, timings, etc. best engage your community and drive growth.

Step 1: Enable Twitch VODs

The first step to saving streams is enabling Video on Demand (VOD) in your Twitch settings:

  1. Login to Twitch and access your Creator Dashboard.

  2. Click on Settings > Stream.

  3. Under VOD Settings, toggle Store Past Broadcasts to the "on" position.

This automatically archives your live streams as they happen. There are a few rules governing how long broadcasts save:

  • Partners and Affiliates: 60 days
  • Non-partners without Prime or Turbo: 14 days
  • Videos turned into Highlights (more below): Forever

Tip: Make sure Automatically Publish VODs is also enabled to instantly post archived footage on your Twitch channel’s Videos page once streams conclude.

Step 2: Create Highlights for Unlimited Storage

Twitch will eventually delete stored VODs to clear up server capacity. But important moments can be immortalized forever by turning segments of streams into Highlights.

Creating a Highlight clip is simple:

  1. Under the Content menu, access Video Producer.

  2. Pick a past broadcast and select Highlight on the right sidebar.

  3. Scan through the footage and set start/end points for your highlight clip.

  4. Finalize any edits and publish your clip.

Now viewers can watch that highlight directly on your Twitch channel homepage without having to dig through full-length VODs.

Pro Tip: Publish your most viral highlights across social media to attract new audiences to your channel. Short, snackable clips perform especially well on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and other platforms.

Step 3: Download Broadcasts

Finally, you can download full-length broadcast VODs and highlight clips from Twitch to archive or edit the footage yourself:

  1. Under Video Producer, click the 3 dots menu next to your video.

  2. Select Download to save the video file to your computer.

Files save in .mp4 format to retain video quality. Note the size of 60+ minute streams may result in large, slow downloads.

Now you have full ownership of your footage to edit together montages, make compilations to upload elsewhere, or simply store for personal records in the future.

Follow these 3 tips to easily preserve your Twitch streaming content:

  1. Turn on VOD Storage in Dashboard Settings

  2. Create Highlights of Important Moments

  3. Download Broadcasts to Own the Videos

Saving past streams makes it simple for both you and your fans to revisit your channel’s greatest hits anytime.

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