I build NoSub, a browser-based VOD player for Twitch and Kick. It started as something narrow — paste a replay link, watch it in a cleaner player — and stayed narrow for about a week. Then I added chat replay, and that turned out to be the part worth writing about.
Watching an old stream without its chat feels strangely flat. Inside jokes land without context, raids look unexplained, and you cannot tell whether a play was genuinely impressive or routine. The video is only half the broadcast. Putting the messages back, in time with the video, is what makes a recording feel like a stream again.
It is also the part I lost the most sleep over.
The question that framed the problem
Someone asked me exactly the right question about it:
