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.

  • acockworkorange
    8·
    4 months ago

    What I’ve seen on science creators on YouTube is that they’d still maintain a presence on yt but recruit people to watch extra/premium content on their other platform, one that allows them to keep more of the money they make.

    Sometimes it’s a subscription service where the user doesn’t need to see ads and promos. Sometimes there’ll be content aware ads and it’s free, but the revenue goes straight to the creator.

    It seems to be a viable business model.