What is a VOD?

A VOD isn't kept for good. Twitch and Kick remove it after a set number of days, and YouTube archives a stream automatically only when it's under 12 hours:

So on most Twitch and Kick channels, a stream's moments have a week to be found. A clipper who wants Friday's best reactions works from the VOD over the weekend, not next month. Streamers lose the least by keeping their own copy: recording in OBS while you stream saves every broadcast to your drive, VOD or not (see OBS recordings to clips).

A VOD is the whole stream; a clip is a few seconds or minutes of it. Kick's help center says you can make clips from a VOD, and those are single moments, saved one at a time. Turning hours of stream into a batch of vertical, captioned clips is a different job.

• Twitch. The steps, and exporting a past broadcast to YouTube instead, are in how to download Twitch VODs.
• Kick. Kick added its own VOD download to the creator dashboard on September 25, 2026, for your own channel. Its help center's article on downloading VODs, updated October 27, 2026, still points to third-party tools. Use the dashboard.
• YouTube. Once the stream has ended and been archived, it's a video with a link of its own, and nothing needs downloading.

Clyper takes YouTube links and uploads, not Twitch or Kick links: upload the VOD as an MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV file of up to 4 GB and 4 hours. A whole stream is often bigger than that; split it into parts with the free video splitter and upload each.

Clipping someone else's streams? The VOD is theirs: clip only streamers who've asked for clips, through a campaign or their own program, and get the file from them (see which streamers pay clippers).

The moments worth clipping in a VOD are the ones the streamer talks through: a reaction, a story between rounds, an argument with the chat. Clyper reads the stream's transcript to find them, so a silent play won't be picked. It stacks the webcam over the game (see facecam), captions every word and gives each clip a hook score. A 4-hour VOD uses 240 credits and can give up to 30 clips, enough to post daily until the next stream. Work through it in the first days, while the stream is still fresh for its viewers and the VOD is still up. Getting the file and splitting it are covered step by step in Twitch VODs to clips and Kick VODs to clips.