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About Owncast

Take control over your content and stream it yourself.

In 2020 the world changed when everyone become stuck in their homes, looking for creative outlets to share their art, skills and themselves from inside their bedroom.

This created an explosion of live streaming on Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Instagram, and Twitch. These services provided everything they needed, an easy way to live stream to the world, and a chat for users to be a part of their community.

That's when I wanted a better option for people. Something you could run yourself and get all the functionality of these services, where you could live stream to an audience and and allow them to take part in the chat, just like they've been used to on all the other services. There should be a independent, standalone Twitch in a Box.

Keep in mind that while streaming to the big social companies is always free, you pay for it with your identity and your data, as well as the identity and data of every person that tunes in. When you self-host anything you'll have to pay with your money instead. But running a self-hosted live stream server can be done for as cheap as $5/mo, and that's a much better deal than selling your soul to Facebook, Google or Amazon.

Gabe Kangas - Owncast project

Easy to use​

The goal is to have a single service that you can run and it works out of the box.

Web interface + chat​

Owncast includes a web interface to your video with built-in chat that is available once you start the server. The web interface was specifically built to be editable by anybody comfortable tweaking a web page. It's not bundled or transpiled into anything, it's just HTML + Javascript + CSS that you can start editing.

Owncast

Use with your existing software​

In general Owncast is compatible with any software that uses RTMP to broadcast to a remote server. RTMP is what all the major live streaming services use, so if you’re currently using one of those it’s likely that you can point your existing software at your Owncast instance instead.

OBS, Streamlabs, Restream and many others are 100% compatible with Owncast.

Web-based admin panel​

Owncast

Live stats​

Owncast

Video storage and delivery options​

Home Page

Distribute the content via the same Owncast server. This is the simplest and works out of the box. In this scenario video will be served to the public from the computer that is running the server. If you have a fast internet connection, enough bandwidth alotted to you, and a small audience (around 10-20 viewers) this may be fine for many people. Have in mind that this will expose your own IP to the world, with the risks involved in that (DDos, Doxing, etc).

Project Link: GitHub