16 Jul 2026 · 5 min read
Yes. Valve's own Steamworks documentation says pre-recorded video is fine on a store page broadcast - asked directly whether pre-recorded content is acceptable, its FAQ answers "Absolutely," and lists things like office tours and development team content as valid examples. The part developers actually get stuck on is not the content rule. It is that Steam has no button that loops a video for you, and that being allowed to loop is not the same thing as being able to broadcast at all.
Valve maintains an official FAQ for store page broadcasts at partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/broadcast/faq, and it addresses this exact question. Asked whether it is acceptable to broadcast pre-recorded footage instead of a live camera feed, Valve answers "Absolutely," then names specific examples of what counts: office tours, development team content, not only gameplay. That is about as unambiguous as a rules document gets, and it is worth reading yourself rather than taking a third party's word for it, including ours.
Valve is not carving out a narrow exception for trailers specifically. It is describing pre-recorded content as a normal, expected way to fill a broadcast slot, on the same footing as a live camera feed. There is no separate "pre-recorded" tier with tighter restrictions attached to it.
Replays are covered too, and Valve is specific about how. If you already ran a live stream and want to show that same footage again later, label it "Re-Broadcast" - that is the exact term used in Valve's documentation. It is a labeling requirement, not a ban: do not present old footage as though it were happening live, and you are inside the rules.
A separate worry is that looping something for days on end looks abusive, even if the content itself is allowed. Valve's FAQ addresses that too: "You can stream as often and as long as you want." Partners have run continuous broadcasts lasting multiple days without issue.
The allowance extends past a fixed schedule as well. For a broadcast built around a scheduled event - a reveal, a Next Fest slot, a launch window - Valve states the stream may continue for up to 24 hours past the event's scheduled end time. You are not required to cut the feed the instant a countdown clock hits zero.
A few additional specifics in Valve's documentation are worth stating plainly, because none of them are guesswork or forum folklore. Overlaying your own username or handle - or one from another platform, if you are simulcasting the same feed elsewhere - on top of the video is explicitly allowed.
Running advertisements inside the video feed itself is technically allowed too, but Valve explicitly discourages it, describing it as bad user experience. Valve does not publish a formal threshold for how much ad content crosses the line, so treat the discouragement itself as the guidance rather than looking for a percentage or a time limit that does not exist.
An unreleased game can be broadcast as well, provided it already has a Coming Soon page on Steam. You do not need to wait for launch day to start looping a trailer on your store page - the page itself just needs to exist first. For the fuller list of what is and is not allowed on a Steam broadcast, see Steam broadcast rules: what you can and can't stream.
Where developers get tripped up is not the policy, it is the mechanics. Steam does not archive or save your broadcast - nothing on Valve's side keeps a copy of what you streamed once it ends, so you have to record it yourself if you want it again. And Steam does not rebroadcast anything automatically. If you go live once and then stop, the store page goes dark; nobody at Valve resends your video on a loop for you.
Valve gives you a receiving end - an RTMP endpoint and stream key your encoder connects to - and permission to send whatever pre-recorded footage you like into it, for as long as you like. What it does not give you is anything on the sending end: there is no upload-and-loop feature in Steamworks, no setting that repeats a file until you say stop. You have to be the one resending it, continuously, for as long as you want the page to show anything. That is the entire gap a 24/7 broadcasting service exists to fill. See what a Steam store broadcast actually is for how the feed works end to end.
Everything above answers a content question: is pre-recorded video allowed. There is a separate, more basic question that trips up far more developers, and Valve's FAQ does not really cover it: is your account allowed to broadcast at all.
Valve's setup documentation, at partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/broadcast/setting_up, lays out the requirements. The Steam account doing the broadcasting has to be non-limited, meaning it has at least $5 of historical spend on the platform. It needs "Broadcast Live" permission, or membership in the Store Broadcast Beta. It has to own or otherwise have access to the game being broadcast. And it cannot be Community Banned.
None of that is a content rule. It has nothing to do with whether your video is pre-recorded, live, long, or short - it is an account-standing rule, and it is the actual reason a broadcast setup that looks correct in every other respect gets refused. It shows up constantly on Steam's forums as some version of "your account does not have sufficient privileges to broadcast live streams," almost always traced back to one of those four requirements rather than anything about the content itself. A brand-new account with no purchase history will be turned away regardless of how compliant the footage is, and that distinction between what is permitted and what your account is currently able to do is worth checking before you assume the rules themselves are the problem.
It matters for anyone evaluating a broadcasting service rather than running their own encoder, too. A service, ours included, only ever operates on the sending end described above: it pushes a video feed into the RTMP endpoint and stream key you give it. It has no way to change your account's spend history, grant you Broadcast Live permission, add you to the Store Broadcast Beta, or lift a Community Ban, because none of that lives on the sending end at all - it is a property of your Steam account, set by Valve, and it exists upstream of any tool you use to push video. If a broadcast will not go live, checking eligibility against those four requirements comes before checking anything about the video file or the service pushing it.
Permission to loop pre-recorded video does not waive the content rules that apply to any Steam broadcast. Footage has to match your game's Steam maturity rating, and Adult Only content is not allowed on a broadcast regardless of format. If your trailer would be fine as a live stream, it is fine on loop. If it would not be, looping it does not change that.
This is a separate check from the eligibility gate above, and passing one does not substitute for the other. A fully eligible account - non-limited, permitted to broadcast, in good standing - can still put up footage that violates the rating rule, and an account that would otherwise be turned away for its content has no eligibility issue to hide behind either. The two failures look identical from the outside, since both end with nothing appearing on your store page, but they are fixed in completely different places: one in your account settings, the other in your video file.
One more thing worth checking before you assume a loop is working: Steam broadcasts default to Friends Only, and only a stream set to public shows up on your store page. A perfectly compliant, perfectly looped feed that is still set to Friends Only will not appear to anyone browsing your page. It is a visibility setting, not a rules question, but it produces the same symptom - nothing showing up - so it is worth ruling out first, especially once eligibility and content are both already confirmed.
None of this requires picking one platform over another. Valve's FAQ explicitly allows sending the same feed to Steam and to Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook at the same time, so a pre-recorded loop on your store page does not compete with whatever you are already doing elsewhere.
One thing worth addressing directly, since it comes up around Steam broadcasts generally: users commonly report roughly 30 seconds of latency on a Steam store broadcast. Valve does not publish an official latency figure, so treat that number as user-reported rather than a documented spec.
For a pre-recorded loop specifically, latency is not really relevant. Latency matters when something is happening live and the delay puts the viewer out of sync with the real event. A looped video has no live event to be out of sync with - whatever a visitor sees, thirty seconds behind or not, is the same recorded footage either way.
A developer who only reads the broadcast FAQ comes away thinking the question is settled: pre-recorded is fine, duration is unlimited, so a loop should just work. A developer who only reads the setup documentation comes away worried about account requirements they have already met. A developer who only reads the forums comes away thinking the whole thing is broken, because the error message they hit does not explain which of several unrelated things caused it. None of the three has the full picture on its own.
The four things that actually decide whether a viewer sees anything are independent of one another: whether the content itself is permitted, whether the account broadcasting it is eligible to do so, whether the stream is set to public rather than Friends Only, and whether something is continuously pushing the feed into Steam's RTMP endpoint. Getting three of the four right and missing the fourth produces the same visible result as getting none of them right - a store page with no broadcast on it - which is why it is worth checking each one on its own rather than assuming the others must be fine because one of them is.
So the content rule was never the obstacle, and neither is duration. The obstacle is that nothing on Steam's side keeps a feed alive by itself - something has to hold the RTMP connection open and keep resending the video, hour after hour, which means either a PC you leave running or a service doing it from a datacenter instead.
A PC works, in the sense that it is technically the same thing a hosted service does: an encoder connected to your stream key, sending frames. The difference is what happens while nobody is watching it - a dropped connection, a Windows update, a laptop going to sleep, and the feed simply stops until someone notices.
If you already have a stream key from Steam, see where to find your Steam stream key, or check pricing for what running the loop from the cloud costs.
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