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.**
The goal is to have a single service that you can run and it works out of the box. **Visit the [Quickstart](https://owncast.online/docs/quickstart/) to get up and running.**
Many aspects can be adjusted and customized to your preferences. [Read more about Configuration](https://owncast.online/docs/configuration/) to update the web UI, video settings, and more.
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.
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 have been used with Owncast. [Read more about compatibility with existing software](https://owncast.online/docs/broadcasting/).
This is the simplest and works out of the box. In this scenario video will be served to the public from the computer that is running the server. If you have a fast internet connection, enough bandwidth alotted to you, and a small audience this may be fine for many people.
Instead of serving video directly from your personal server you can use a S3 compatible storage provider to offload the bandwidth and storage requirements elsewhere.
Read [more detailed documentation about configuration of S3-compatible services](https://owncast.online/docs/s3/).
There is also a supplied `Dockerfile` so you can spin it up from source with little effort. [Read more about running from source](https://owncast.online/docs/building/).
