Owncast Newsletter September 2024
In This Issue
A Note From The Editor
Goodness! Do I have an issue for you this month! After a mild drought of news to report in August, a flood came in this month. I'm so grateful for the Owncast Rocket.Chat for bringing so much to my attention, and please...if you've got something you're working on, drop by the chat or reach out to me on the Fediverse. I'm just one hack writer, and I can't publish the things I don't hear about.
But, it's been an exciting month in general in Owncast land. Just about every night, I fire up the Owncast Roku app to just see what's on, and I've been watching steady growth in the number of channels over there. Whether it's a live feed of local weather, a new 24/7 streaming station, or just someone firing up Owncast to "just chat", it's always exciting to watch the ecosystem grow and become more diverse.
So, without further ado, I'll turn it over to the featured content, since there's so much.
Feature: RFF's August Fediwave Retrospective
You'll recall from the August issue that we amplified Radio Free Fedi's (RFF's) August artist series, and here we are, a couple weeks after August ends, to report that this series was a great success in promoting independent art and Owncast as a free streaming technology. The series boasted a lineup of 15 artists, giving a month long showcase of creativity, community, and solidarity.
I was able to catch up with some of the artists featured in the series, and they had some complimentary words for RFF and their efforts creating yet another opportunity for Owncasters to get their work out to new and wider audiences.
Friend of the newsletter, Meljoann, had this to say:
I loved playing my mutant R&B beats on the Fediwave, and I loved that our new community Gancio livestream calendar came in super handy. There were familiar faves, new discoveries and top chat bants this month. Kudos to RFF for organising!
New friend to the newsletter, Kristoffer Lislegaard, who joined the event both as a fan and streamer, shared his thoughts:
Independent individuals and small groups organizing and coming together feels to me like the Fediverse at its best, and the August series really showcased this in a wonderful way. It was a great experience to both tune in as an audience member and to play my audiovisual experimental ambient concert there. I also love the sharing of knowledge that is present in our group of people and the fact that Luka Prinčič told me about rescaling vcpus on the vps totally saved my stream.
Some of the biggest challenges independent artists face is in promotion. Without the support of a deep-pockets publisher or the capricious favor of an algorithm from a major captialist platform, it's difficult to develop and keep an audience. Indeed, it's quite common to mention the Fediverse or Owncast to most people, only to get a funny look and a "Do you just have an Instagram I can follow?" Getting new fans not already familiar with these platforms on board is difficult, and so events like RFF's streaming series are critical to the internal promotions of our community, ensuring we all meet and know each other and appreciate our work. The newsletter thanks and salutes the hard work at RFF to coordinate another valuable community event and reminds streamers to keep using the #FediWave tag to encourage discoverability on the Fediverse!
Feature: Owncast On Lemmy
This last month, Gabe Kangas shared a link to a new Owncast community on Lemmy. The community is heavily the work of a contributor who posts a collection of interesting streams as they go live. This is, to the best knowledge of the newsletter's editor, the first time an Owncast community has appeared on Lemmy, and as discoverability is one of the biggest challenges facing an Owncast streamer, decided to seek him out and get his perspectives on his project.
The creator of the community, Ozoned, has a user and sysadmin of various open source technologies for years. He became a user and supporter of the Fediverse back in 2017, seeing it as a way to move away from the abuses of the behemoth capitalist tech platforms. He also eventually became a fan of Owncast, noting that "[a]s someone that's been on Twitch since before it was Twitch (ah how I miss you Justin.TV), I think since 2011, I was massively excited to find I could run my own service. But surely it had to be difficult right? NOPE! Gabe set up the easiest install I've EVER seen."
Regarding his interest in setting up a Lemmy community, Ozoned expressed the "do what you can with what you have" spirit that's led to much of the Owncast community, including this newsletter:
"I've gotten good at over the years is learning a tech and then helping others understand it. So I figured, I'd start spreading the word where ever I could. Reddit is out, because I just don't approve of their philosophy"..."But when I checked Lemmy, it seemed to be growing, and I didn't see an Owncast community that was active, so I created one. It's basically just me posting when streams go live and ones I find interesting."
Owncast is very much built to integrate into the Fediverse, and especially Mastodon, but distributed microblogging doesn't always make for easy discussion, discovery, and curation. The newsletter is eager to see how this community on Lemmy progresses.
Featured Streamer: Pretok.TV
This month, we're highlighting Pretok.TV, a project created and maintained by Luka Prinčič, a technologist-composer whose repertoire ranges from electronic funk to ambient drones. Luka is extremely prolific, and uses Pretok.TV ("pretok" being Slovenian for "transmission") as a vehicle for promoting a number of different projects of a personal and professional nature. In addition to their own musical creations, Pretok supports the work of Kamizdat, a "free-form boutique netlabel for Creative Commons music," and Emanat, a cultural organization dedicated to dance and modern art.
Luka has been experimenting with streaming media practically since the beginning, recalling working with RealAudio in avant-garde artist groups at the legendary Radio Študent in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Since then, they've always incorporated some aspect of independent streaming in their projects. Most notably, Pretok became a regular name in their projects when Luka and partner Maja Delak began streaming their sudio jam sessions.
Luka settled on Owncast after trying various other open source streaming options and finding Owncast to be be the easiest to use and scale. Over time, Pretok has evolved into a hub for a variety of services used for Luka's personal and professional work, utilizing Owncast for live events, Icecast for audio streaming, and Peertube for video archives.
Pretok's ability to support such a wide range of media, projects, and interests, including live club performances, presentations, studio streaming, and more, is a testament to what's now achievable with technologies like Owncast. The archives run deep, so start there and, if you like what you hear, consider subscribing to the Owncast live server so you don't miss a show!
Closing Remarks
It feels like we've just had so much going on in the community to celebrate this month. If there's a theme to be found among them, it's about the importance of community engagement to finding an audience. Owncast is a technology that's made live streaming more accessible, but it's not Twitch; we all have to make and share our own community. That's also to say that for every summary of a project I find, I know there are dozens I haven't even heard of. This is to say that, if you know of an interesting project, event, or bit of news, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Additionally, if you'd like to help build the social fabric of the Owncast community, please consider checking out the Owncast community on Lemmy or the #owncast-community channel on rocket.chat.