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.

  • teawrecks
    2·
    1 month ago

    if they do, I imagine they have MORE than enough money to be able to afford a CDN or S3

    As long as they’re continuing to run ads or getting enough “subscriptions” to maintain it. I don’t think any twitch streamer, no matter how big an audience they have or how much money they have, would go live just to burn through their cash.

    sadly it’s the point that everyone instantly comes up with WHY folks shouldn’t use Owncast.

    Yeah, that’s not the argument I’m making. Again, I love the idea of owncast, for all the reasons you gave in your last paragraph, but mostly just to give people the option to not be dependent on a for-profit corporation. But like with youtube, tiktok, and other video-based social platforms, they’re costly to run and moderate, and thus difficult to federate. I’m just trying to understand where its practical limits are right now.

    streams are just bunches of files

    Are they? Very short lived files I guess? Because the delay on a twitch stream can be as low as a couple of seconds. Not sure about owncast.

    • ozoned@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      1 month ago

      Yes, my understanding of anything on the web is that it’s STILL just files that are broken up and sent to you.

      https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/video/what-is-streaming/

      Streaming is the continuous transmission of audio or video files from a server to a client. In simpler terms, streaming is what happens when consumers watch TV or listen to podcasts on Internet-connected devices. With streaming, the media file being played on the client device is stored remotely, and is transmitted a few seconds at a time over the Internet.

      I reserve the right to be wrong about EVERYTHING! :-D

      • teawrecks
        1·
        1 month ago

        Cool, then yeah, provided the streamer is still making money on their stream, then paying for a CDN would probably be a good solution.

        Might have to try this out some time just to see how complicated it is to get working.

        • ozoned@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          1 month ago

          Honestly it’s probably the easiest install I’ve ever done. :-D Don’t hesitate to ping me on Lemmy or on Matrix or where ever if you have any issues, questions, etc. :-)