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.
I’m glad this exists, but as viewers go up, the bandwidth requirements for the streamer are just too large for one person to deal with unless they’re a corporation with ad profits to pay for it.
I suspect for this to be usable at large scale it will need to be bittorrent based.
I don’t personally agree. Again, I’ve had 70+ connections open at one time and when I estimated the cost of bandwidth, I wouldn’t even hit my monthly budget that Hetzner gives me for “free”. But Owncast has S3 and CDN support built in if you really need to handle something like that.
At what bitrate? I’m thinking about the big streamers with tens of thousands of viewers at once, most watching in 1080+.
I’m not really familiar with the capabilities of CDNs when it comes to live streams, but that could be good enough.
On that $8/month VPS I think at the time I had 2 qualities. 1080 5kbps was the 70+ open streams. I don’t expect “big streamers” to join Owncast soon if ever. But if they do, I imagine they have MORE than enough money to be able to afford a CDN or S3. We’re not talking MILLIONS per months. I don’t think even think we’re even talking thousands, hundreds probably. But yes. You make a good point. And sadly it’s the point that everyone instantly comes up with WHY folks shouldn’t use Owncast. I personally just try to create a welcoming community for anyone interested in trying Owncast. As time goes on those costs of tech continue to go down. If you’re running a server from your house, unless you have a datacap, then you don’t even need to worry about cost of bandwidth, obviously infrastructure does matter though.
As far as CDNs go, streams are just bunches of files. Your player goes out, grabs some files, and you watch it. So a CDN works for vidoe streams like anything else and I almost guarantee that Twitch leverages CDNs as well.
You could do the same with a S3 bucket as well. So if the CDN is too expensive (I honestly don’t know the prices), you could do a S3 bucket.
I have about 12 folks watching me on average at this point. Still better than I had on Twitch. :-) But also, this is MY page. I’ve tweaked the CSS to make it look more like mine. I can show what I want, I don’t have to jump through hoops to keep up with Twitch’s algorithm, I don’t have to show ads, my page doesn’t take 20 seconds to load because it’s loading all kinds of junk in the background. I love it personally. It’s mine. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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. :-)
If you’re interested, just go check out the directory. Go watch someone. See if anything strikes your fancy. :-) https://directory.owncast.online/
I’m not trying to sway your opinion in the least. It’s not for everyone in the least. I’m just trying to help folks realize there is a REAL alternative to the big platforms. We ARE talking on an open platform Reddit. ;-)