Abstract The emerging research field of stream reasoning faces the challenging trade-off between expressiveness of query programs and data throughput. For optimizing programs methods are needed to tell whether two programs are equivalent. Towards providing practical reasoning techniques on streams, we consider LARS programs, which is a powerful extension of Answer Set Programming (ASP) for stream reasoning that supports windows on streams for discarding information. We define different notions of equivalence between such programs and give semantic characterizations in terms of models. We show how a practically relevant fragment can be alternatively captured using Here-and-There models, yielding an extension of equilibrium semantics of ASP to this class of programs. Finally, we characterize the computational complexity of deciding the considered equivalence relations.