Twitch paywalls highly-requested Rewind feature Kick and YouTube offer for free
Twitch’s long-awaited rewind feature is finally coming summer 2025, but unlike YouTube and Kick, the Amazon-owned platform is hiding it behind a paywall.
The ability to quickly rewind streams has been a highly-requested feature for years onTwitch, with viewers yearning for the option to watch earlier parts of a broadcast without going into a VOD.
Rival platforms likeKick and YouTubehave already been offering this feature for a long time, despite being newer to the live streaming world.
AtTwitchCon Europe, CEO Dan Clancy confirmed rewind would be coming to Twitch in the summer – but there’s a huge catch.
Twitch makes users pay to use rewind feature
Speaking at TwitchCon in Rotterdam, Clancy explained that “everyone” has been in a situation where they wished Twitch had a rewind feature.
“You’ll be able to scrub back through a stream to see what you missed, and once you’re all caught up, just press the Live button to rejoin the stream.”
Twitch Turbo costs users $11.99 USD per month, while an individual subscription for a channel costs $5.99.
As such, anyone who may want to use the Rewind feature on multiple channels would be better off paying for Turbo, or just watching on YouTube or Kick if that creator is also multi-streaming to those platforms.
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⏮️ Rewind is ComingMissed the start of a stream? Need to catch up mid-chaos?Rewind is entering testing this summer. Just scrub back. No excuses.pic.twitter.com/bQeEZnd8Zg
Notably, Kick and YouTube don’t charge users anything to use their built-in rewind technology, and viewersaren’t too pleasedwith Twitch’s decision.
“Paywalling 15-year-old tech is insane from the Amazon people,” one user blasted.
“If there’s one company I’d trust to reliably shoot themselves in the foot every time they do something cool, it’s Twitch,” another mocked.
It’s worth pointing out that this is technically still a test for the rewind feature and it could undergo some refinements. So, it’s possible that it will end up rolling out to everyone down the line.
For now, though, anyone desperately wanting to rewind a Twitch broadcast will need to pay to do so. That said, not every new feature will cost users, withvertical streams, for example, arriving this summer.
