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.
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
Live stats
Video storage and delivery options
- 🖥️ Local Delivery
- 📤 Owncast + Media Network
- 🧲 Full Web3 Experience
Project Link: GitHub