One of the things that can ruin a stream is getting disconnected. It’s already bad enough if you get disconnected from a multiplayer match, but if your internet drops out, your stream also ends. Having your stream just end like this can be jarring for viewers, as you’re just suddenly gone and generally can’t immediately explain the situation.
For those streamers that export their streams to YouTube for archival purposes or to share with viewers that can’t watch live, disconnects make the process a lot harder. When you reconnect and restart your stream, Twitch registers it as a second stream. This means you can’t just export your whole stream directly to YouTube as one video. You can either choose to export multiple videos or you can download them all, combine them manually, then upload them to YouTube, which takes extra time.
To help you out in this sort of scenario, Twitch offers a disconnect protection feature. Disconnect protection gives you a ninety-second grace period to attempt to resolve your internet issues and resume streaming. During those ninety seconds, your viewers will be shown a generic Twitch disconnection image. If you do manage to reconnect within the ninety-second timeframe your stream will continue, without a break, meaning you can still export a single video and it won’t have a ninety-second gap in it. Unfortunately, if you exceed the time limit your stream will end, and you’ll have to start the stream fully again when you’re back online.
To enable disconnect protection you need to go into the channel preferences in the creator dashboard. To open the dashboard, click on your profile picture in the top-right corner, then click on “Creator Dashboard”.
Once in the creator dashboard, expand the “Preferences” category in the left column, then click on “Channel”. In the channel preferences, click the “Disconnect Protection” slider, which can be found as the second option from the top, to the “On” position.
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