How to add rewind, pause, and instant replay to live streams?

Here’s what you’re probably dealing with:

• Your live stream is running, but someone asks, “Can I go back and see what just happened?”
• Your social team wants to clip and share a highlight before the stream end, not wait an hour for editing.
• Users join late or get interrupted and want to pause or rewind, just like they can on YouTube Live or sports apps.

But if you’re using standard live streaming, those features aren’t built in. Viewers can only watch what’s happening now. Miss it, and it’s gone.

If you want to let people pause, rewind, or instantly clip live video, this guide explains how the big platforms do it, where the technical challenges are, and how you can add these features without rebuilding your whole streaming setup.

Let’s get straight to it.

That rewind or pause button you see on YouTube Live?

It’s popularly known in the streaming industry as timeshifting (or DVR).

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How Timeshift & DVR actually work?  

When you let viewers pause or rewind a live stream, you’re not just giving them a UI trick, you’re creating a window into the recent past. Think of it as a rolling buffer: your backend is constantly capturing, segmenting, and storing the last few minutes (or hours) of the broadcast.

• The Moving Window: Instead of only showing what’s happening now, your system stores a chunk of recent live video. New segments come in, old ones roll out. How big that window is, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 12 hours, is up to you and your storage limits.

• What Gets Stored (and for How Long): You control the buffer size. A short window saves on storage, but limits how far back users can jump. A longer window means more flexibility, but higher storage costs.

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Where does rewind/clip happen? (player, server, protocol)

Adding rewind, pause, and clipping isn’t just a front-end job, it’s a whole system.

• Player UI: Lets the user pause, scrub, or replay, but only works if there’s data to fetch from the backend.

• Server: Does the heavy lifting: records and segments the live feed, manages the rolling window, and serves up any requested part of the buffer.

• Protocols (HLS/DASH): These define how your video is chunked and delivered. Both can support sliding windows and seeking, but only if your backend is set up to provide those chunks.

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Who does what?

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Bottom line: It’s the backend and protocol setup that actually makes live rewind and clipping possible. The player just asks for segments, the server and protocol decide what’s available.

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How the big platforms do it (YouTube, Sports apps, Twitch)

YouTube Live: Runs a rolling buffer up to 12 hours. Viewers can pause, scrub back, and clip moments while the stream is live.

Twitch: Offers rewind and instant clip features (sometimes region or partner restricted). Gamers can jump back to key plays without missing new action.

Sports Streaming Apps: Timeshift isn’t optional. Viewers scrub back to the last goal, pause mid-game, or share instant replays, all thanks to a real rolling buffer behind the scenes.

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Why adding ‘Rewind’ breaks more than you think

If you’re reading this, you’re probably in one of two places:

• You’re designing your video workflow from scratch, and you want rewind, pause, and instant replay built in, before anyone complains.

• Or your live stack is in production, and suddenly, product or ops is asking, “Can users go back and replay a live moment?”

Either way the process is well…complicated.

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What makes timeshifting hard?

Live is a one-way stream by default.

Standard live video just pushes packets from encoder to player. Once data is sent and played, it’s gone. There’s no going back, unless you architect explicit storage and indexing up front.

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Now you need a rolling buffer.

This means capturing every segment of your stream, managing disk or object storage, and keeping a running window (maybe minutes, maybe hours). You’re not just streaming, you’re now in the storage business.

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Serving non-live segments complicates everything.

Suddenly your API and CDN need to handle random access. You’re not just serving “now”, you’re serving “now minus N seconds/minutes,” and that blows up caching, indexing, and sometimes even your server memory.

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Protocol support is not a shortcut.

HLS and DASH support seeking and sliding windows, but they can only expose what you actually store and serve. If your backend can’t produce the segments, the protocol can’t help.

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Impact on new vs existing workflows

Starting new?

You can design your architecture around a rolling window from day one. This means:

• Storage layer that efficiently buffers and evicts old segments

• Backend that indexes every chunk for instant seeking

• APIs that let the player request any time within the buffer ‍

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‍Already live?

Now you’re bolting on storage and buffer logic, rewriting how your backend indexes and serves content, and adding API endpoints that can return historic segments, without breaking your live path. This is where “simple” rewinds break streams for real users.

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The trap most teams fall into

Slapping a seek bar onto your player feels easy. Until you realize the player isn’t the hard part, the backend is.

• Costs sneak up fast: every extra minute of buffer = more storage, more egress, and bills that suddenly spike 10×. ‍
• Buffers multiply problems: the longer you keep video around, the more edge cases appear, dropped connections, partial segments, timeline mismatches. ‍
• Playback breaks: if your buffer logic isn’t tight, seeks fail, streams stutter, and recovery is flaky.

Most in-house builds stop here. Not because the team isn’t capable, but because the effort-to-reward curve is brutal. Debugging rolling buffer logic for every edge case is weeks of work you’ll never get back.

That’s where something like FastPix makes sense. The service handles segment storage, rolling buffers, and API-level access for you, so your team can focus on building features instead of hunting down obscure playback bugs.

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How to enable DVR (Time-shifting) in live streams with FastPix

Live time-shifting (DVR mode) lets viewers pause, rewind, or fast-forward a live stream, just like YouTube Live. This gives your users full control, even if they join late or want to replay a moment.

With FastPix DVR mode enabled, anyone can instantly jump back to the very start of the live stream, no matter when they joined.

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Modes of operation

FastPix supports two modes configure as needed:

• DVR mode (enableDvrMode: true):
  All time-shifting controls (pause, rewind, fast-forward) are enabled. Ideal for sports, webinars, and news.

• Non-DVR mode (enableDvrMode: false):
  Stream runs in real time only. No pausing or rewinding. Best for auctions, interactive gaming, or anywhere immediacy is key.

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Enabling DVR when creating a live stream

To activate DVR, set "enableDvrMode": true in your API call when you create a live stream.

Sample request:

1{
2  "playbackSettings": {
3    "accessPolicy": "public"
4  },
5  "inputMediaSettings": {
6    "maxResolution": "1080p",
7    "reconnectWindow": 60,
8    "mediaPolicy": "public",
9    "enableDvrMode": true,
10    "metadata": {
11      "livestream_name": "fastpix_livestream"
12    }
13  }
14}

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Sample response (truncated for clarity):

1{
2  "success": true,
3  "data": {
4    "streamId": "9d29c6d13d9e96133536dd217bfaf635",
5    ...,
6    "enableDvrMode": true,
7    "playbackIds": [
8      {
9        "id": "e37e66a3-090a-4ac6-83ef-b45c03d7a39c",
10        "accessPolicy": "public"
11      }
12    ]
13  }
14}

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Viewing a DVR-enabled live stream

To let viewers use DVR controls, append ?dvrMode=true to your FastPix playback URL:

https://stream.fastpix.io/{playbackId}.m3u8?dvrMode=true

Replace {playbackId} with the value from your stream creation response.

Note: DVR features only work if the stream was created with "enableDvrMode": true.

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Requirements for a smooth DVR experience

Use a player that supports HLS + DVR:

• For browsers (like Chrome/Firefox), use hls.js.

• Safari supports HLS/DVR natively, but configuration options are limited.
  

Make sure DVR mode is enabled on your stream and in your URL.

Player settings to tune:

• backBufferLength: Sets how far back viewers can seek.

• maxBufferLength: Controls total buffer size for smooth playback.

• lowLatencyMode: Minimizes live lag.

• Error recovery (like manifestLoadingRetry, levelLoadingRetry).
  

Include seek controls in your player UI:

• Many players hide seek bars by default. Make sure users can actually scrub the timeline.

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Check browser compatibility:

• Use hls.js for anything except Safari, which handles HLS natively.

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Level up your stream: timeshifting plus live clipping

Now, beyond timeshifting, there’s another feature that takes your live streaming workflow even further: Instant live clipping and shoppable video player

While timeshifting lets you pause and rewind, live clipping allows you to instantly extract and save highlights from your ongoing stream, without waiting for the event to end. Used together, these two features let your team (or your audience) quickly find the key moment with timeshifting, and immediately turn it into a shareable clip with just a few clicks or an API call.

Now you don’t just catch up, you capture, publish, and amplify your most important moments while the stream is still live. For any workflow that depends on real-time reactions, news, sports, product drops, or influencer events this combination is a game changer. To know more on Live clipping and the other live streaming features that we have check our docs and guide.