Owncast is a free and open source live video and web chat server for use with existing popular broadcasting software.
Basically it’s Twitch, or any streaming platform such as YouTube Gaming or whatever it’s called now, that you can run on your own hardware. Control your platform and your content where you make the rules as to what you can/can’t do.
There’s a growing community and you can find folks streaming all kinds of things in the directory:
https://directory.owncast.online/
I know some folks think it’s not possible to run something like that as it’d require tons of PC resources, but I’ve run an Owncast Stream with 70+ active open connections to the server on a $8/month VPS.
The install can be as simple as a VPS that will spin up an Owncast instance for you, or as “difficult” as pulling the Owncast script and running it and it just automatically sets everything up. It’s probably the easiest software installation I’ve done in a long time and I’ve been in IT for 15 years.
I also run the !owncast@lemmy.world community so if anyone has any questions please don’t hesitate to poke me there or Matrix or come check out a stream, I’m usually hanging out on someone’s stream somewhere. :-D Or don’t hesitate to ping me on any one of the platforms in my bio.
That’s cool and all, but who exactly is gonna watch it? Like it’s a fine idea, but there’s literately no point.
You could say this exact same thing about any invention.
“But why would anyone want to speak into a wire? There’s literally no point.”
“Are you seriously going to wrap your food in plastic? There’s literally no point.”
“Who will want to type on a phone without any buttons? There’s literally no point.”
“Nobody is going to want to eat meat grown in a lab. There’s literally no point.”
Not everything needs to be built with a use in mind, and even if it has a small user base at first, needs change over time. For all we know this is visionary and ahead of its time, but we don’t know it yet.
Over COVID, we started a bad/cult movie night that I streamed over Discord. Streaming via Twitch/Youtube would get copyright struck immediately. Streaming over Discord worked, but you have no real control over stream quality, and often the stream quality is based on the person with the worst connection. You also are locked to 30/60 FPS, which sometimes causes small frame weirdness when most movies are at 24.
An easy, self hosted solution is exactly what I wanted at the time. I played with setting up a streaming server but it ended up being too much of a headache at the time.
There’s a ton of valid reasons to self host. Just because you can’t think of any doesn’t mean it’s pointless.
I don’t want to stream on Twitch, YouTube, or Kick. My audience is my group of close friends on discord. I’d rather not use the big platforms for multiple reasons. The main one being these platforms see everyone as numbers and have moved away from pretending to be customer focused and are all bottom line focused to a fault now.
So owncast. Quick webhook call to the discord servers announcing the stream started and people can watch me fail on League of Legends.
Side note, realize I said big platforms and discord is still in use. Moving friends off of discord is its own challenge. But I’ve been working on that.
Why… not just stream on discord? You’re already using it. This honestly seems like a lot of extra work for very little pay off.
Discord’s video quality is pretty mediocre. If you’ve already got a home server somewhere and a decent internet connection, streaming 1080p or higher over this probably works better than streaming over Discord.
You can buy Discord premium or whatever it’s called, but that’s priced high enough that a home server electricity bill or even a VPS with pretty decent specs can be had for the same price.
As for why you’d go through the effort: same reason Linux users don’t run Windows, because they like the philosophy or because they want the control over their stuff.
Edit: also, streaming games from Linux through Discord still doesn’t support sound. I work around this by using Pipewire’s ability to re-route game output into the microphone input stream for voice chat, but that’s just a stupid workaround for Discord’s bad service.
What do you mean? People watch twitch, why would this be any different?
Exactly. People stream all sorts of things. I’ve seen tabletop wargamers doing it in the local hobby store, podcasters who send out links, virtual family get-togethers, etc. It’s awesome having non-corporate alternatives for people who want them. Not everything is meant to be widest audience possible.
And they find that because twitch is one of the biggest sites on the internet and has okay-good discoverability. And even then, it is generally weeks (if not months) of effort to get to the O(10) concurrents, let alone O(100) where it starts being profitable on time alone… let alone hosting.
Versus some random website on a meme domain that nobody will ever find.
Its the same with peertube and the like: The use case for individuals is near zero and it mostly exists as something to fuel sites like Nebula or floatplane that are trying to build their own services.
People stream for fun, not just for money. If you start streaming with the intention of it becoming a career, you are doing it wrong.
Encouraging the use of alternative sites is the only way alternative sites grow, dismissing them because ‘X site is already bigger, so theres no point’ is supporting the “monopoly” problem.
Did you know, we used to visits hundreds of sites on the internet, it’s only the last 10-15 years that corporations have managed to consolodate it.
And you do know that there is a very big difference between hosting a text based site on tripod, an image heavy site, and a video site, right?
The reason The Old Internet died out is largely because of the middle. When you have zero revenue (because everyone runs an ad blocker) but people are shitting on you because your screenshots are only 640x480 instead of (oh dear god) 1080p? You start looking at aggregation sites that will pay that hosting fee for you. Hence, social media.
And then you have video. Even short clips could make your hosting bill explode. And sites like Rooster Teeth that pretty much existed solely on their ability to host a five minute video every week were basically constantly in a mess. This is why sites like Giant Bomb ended up starting with Mysterious Investors and ended up getting bought out.
Because you know what is also not good for “the ‘monopoly’ problem”? A site getting hugged to death the moment it is even mentioned on a low traffic subreddit/community. Which is what happens when people host their own video heavy sites. Which lead to adding advertisements and getting sponsored which leads to all the people saying they are an evil site and should burn in hell and here, let’s re-upload all their content to youtube or liveleak or whatever.
Even if you feel that no true art can come from anything profitable and all that stupidity that ignores that time and materials have a cost: Hosting also has a cost. If someone’s streams can’t even support the money it costs them to stream it? That doesn’t last long and can lead to a nice payment plan if your VOD goes viral while you are asleep.
This attitude is how we got here, just let people have fun on the internet, not everything has to grow to be a replacement of something else. If people self host some streams for a few months and had fun, it was worth it.
I stream on twitch. Can you multi stream and mirror chat from owncast to twitch and vice versa?
I don’t see why multi streaming shouldn’t be possible using whatever you already use, you’ll just have to set one of the streams up as a custom location as I don’t think even OBS has own cast built into its options
And if there isn’t a bot already capable of mirroring chat I bet it’d be piss easy to make, though I’m not saying you should, more that “if there’s interest it’ll happen” kinda thing
