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 [email protected] 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.
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.
Shame on me. If I just believe hard enough that will solve all bandwidth, data, hosting, and discoverability issues.
This is not at all a trivial problem. If it were, then aggregator sites like dig/reddit would have never taken over from message boards and youtube/twitch would have never beaten a tripod site with a relplayer (HISS!!!) video.
Cool, you know how to win on the internet, go off and do that.