Owncast

What it is

Owncast is a self-hosted, open-source live streaming server — “your own Twitch in a box.” Point OBS (or any RTMP-capable encoder) at it and viewers get a polished web page with your live stream, a built-in chat, and stream customization — no third-party platform in the middle. It’s a single static binary (or one Docker container) with sane defaults, so it runs comfortably on a VPS, a home server, or a Raspberry Pi.

Streams can optionally federate to the fediverse via ActivityPub, so followers get notified when you go live. There’s an admin dashboard for stream keys, stream health, viewer stats, and chat moderation.

Why it kills the SaaS

Paid streaming platforms take a cut of your revenue, own your audience relationship, and can ban or demonetize you on a whim. Restreaming and studio tools like StreamYard charge monthly just to put a logo on your own video. Owncast is free, unlimited, and answerable to nobody — your stream, your chat, your rules.

Paste this into Claude Code

Set up a self-hosted Owncast live streaming server on this machine.

1. Install Owncast the official way (https://owncast.online/docs): either run the one-line installer script for the standalone binary, or use Docker with `docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -p 1935:1935 --name owncast owncast/owncast:latest` — prefer Docker if it's available here.
2. Verify the service is up: the public page should load at http://localhost:8080 and the admin dashboard at http://localhost:8080/admin (default stream key/admin password is abc123 — change it immediately and show me how).
3. Walk me through connecting OBS: server rtmp://<this-machine>:1935/live with the stream key, and recommend sane bitrate/encoder settings for this machine's hardware.
4. Do a short local test stream and confirm playback and chat work in the browser.
5. When I'm ready to go public, set up TLS and open/forward ports 8080 and 1935.