What survives when a Twitch VOD expires

People use "VOD", "clip" and "highlight" loosely, and it stops mattering right up until a broadcast disappears and something you wanted is gone with it. Twitch stores the three differently and expires them differently.

Past broadcasts

The automatic recording of a stream. This is the thing on a timer — 7 days on a standard account, 14 for Affiliates, 60 for Partners, and 60 for anyone with Turbo or Prime. When that window closes the recording is deleted. Details in how long Twitch keeps your VODs.

Clips

Short segments someone cut deliberately, either you or a viewer. A Clip is its own stored object, not a pointer into the broadcast, so it does not vanish when the broadcast does. This is why a channel can still have clips from streams whose recordings are long gone.

Clips a viewer made are also the most honest signal you have about what landed. Somebody watched, decided a moment was worth keeping, and did the work of cutting it — that is a stronger vote than a view count.

Highlights

A segment you mark and save from a past broadcast, which Twitch then keeps as its own object rather than deleting on the broadcast's schedule. If there is a stretch you know you want and you are not ready to edit it, marking it as a Highlight before the window closes is the cheapest way to keep it.

What this means in practice

• The clock you are racing is on the past broadcast, not on anything you have already cut.
• Anything already clipped or highlighted is safe from that particular deadline.
• The risk is the footage you have not looked at yet — which, for most channels, is nearly all of it.

To see how much of that you currently have, our VOD expiry checker lists a channel's public past broadcasts with their ages. No account needed.