How to run a 24/7 YouTube live stream without keeping your computer on

A 24/7 stream made of existing videos is not a “live” show but a continuous video feed sent to YouTube. YouTube does not care where the feed comes from: it receives it over RTMP using a stream key. Only one thing matters — the feed must not stop.

The easiest start is OBS on your own computer. But then the computer and your home internet have to run without a break for weeks. A system reboot, an update, a power glitch or a slow connection — and the stream drops. At night nobody notices until morning.

That is why such streams usually move to a server in a data center, with stable power and bandwidth. The server stores your videos and feeds them to YouTube non-stop. You can set up a server with ffmpeg yourself — it is cheap, but you will have to deal with Linux, restarts after failures and changing titles by hand.

What to keep in mind either way. First: the videos should share one format, otherwise the stream can break where one video joins the next — so they are re-encoded to a single profile in advance. Second: YouTube keeps a stream recording no longer than 12 hours, so a long stream is conveniently split into segments with the broadcast restarted. Third: YouTube's rules on repetitive and reused content apply to streams too — the channel owner is responsible for the content.

AutoStream does all of this on our server: you upload videos, the service re-encodes them to one format, you build a playlist and set a schedule — and the stream runs with your computer off. Each segment is created as a separate broadcast with its own title and thumbnail from your set, and the stream restarts by itself after a failure. You can try it free for 3 days, no card required.