VOD

The phrase comes from television and cable, where video on demand distinguished a library of programmes a viewer could start at will from a scheduled broadcast. Live streaming platforms reused it for the archive of a finished stream. On Twitch a VOD is the past broadcast, on YouTube a live stream becomes a regular video once it ends, and Kick and others follow the same pattern.

For streamers and clippers it is the raw material. A live stream disappears as it happens, but the VOD holds every moment, including the ones nobody clipped in the chat at the time. Clipping from the VOD rather than live means a moment can be found by scanning the whole broadcast, started on exactly the right sentence, and reframed from the full resolution recording.

The nuance is that VODs are not permanent and not always complete. Twitch keeps past broadcasts for a limited number of days that depends on the account's status, and sections of audio can be muted where copyrighted music was detected. Streamers who want a lasting archive export highlights or upload the recording elsewhere, which is also where a clipper should look before assuming the footage is gone.

Practically, a streamer working with clippers either downloads each VOD and shares it or points to a channel where the archive is kept, and the clippers pull moments from that file. Scanning a multi hour VOD for standalone moments is exactly the task automatic moment finding was built for, since watching the whole thing again is the alternative.