Owncast Newsletter January 2026
In This Issue
- A Note From The Editor
- Technical Updates
- Features
- Closing Remarks
A Note From The Editor
Ah, one dumpster fire of a year behind us and another freshly out the gate! I kid, but we're of course in an era of political, social, and technological turmoil, and it feels like there are no solutions in sight. And yet, while I feel powerless in the face of the ugliness in the world, I, and all of us, still have the power to make communities where something more beautiful and human flourishes. Owncast, of course, doesn't make communities on its own, but it can be a valuable tool to give communities live streaming for themselves, and coming together over shared events and experiences has always been a fundamental aspect of community.
From that perspective, Owncast has had a fine 2025 for itself. The Owncasts Roku app has had multiple improvements, including the freedom to add servers not listed in the directory. The number of streamers and events has expanded. Signs of new organization are sprouting up. And, as if to receive a little bit of festive season magic all our own, a new 24/7 music videos stream launched! We'll be covering that in the featured streamer section.
2026, of course, looks like more of the same out there in the world...global political instability, a late stage capitalist "broligarchy" all too happy to be cozy to increasingly brash authoritarians, and and Internet that seems less free every day. But I encourage everyone who reads this to take those moments of hopeless rage and channel them into something for our communities that matter. Start that project. Volunteer that extra weekend. Make that tiny donation to an artist you admire. And, of course, friends, keep the streams rolling.
Owncast 0.2.4 Released
Owncast 0.2.4 was released earlier this month. It continues the 0.2.x series theme of working on behind-the-scenes improvements indended to give the kind of sustainable base needed to build for the future. That's not to say it's not without a suite of important features! There's been a lot of localization improvements to the UI, higher bitrate support, improvements to the webhooks, and many other requested improvements.
I caught up with Gabe to see how he's feeling about the ongoing 0.2.x series. He let me know that a 0.2.5 release should be in the mix soon, and that he really looks forward to the kind of big release work that will define the first 0.3.x release, bug fixes and user requests on the stable and useful 0.2.x series still matter a lot.
Owncast Chat Moving To Matrix
When it came time to consider an update to the Rocket.chat system, the main chat rooms for the Owncast devs and community are (at least on an experimental basis) moved to Matrix. Matrix has been a more widely-accepted chat system among FOSS projects and Fediverse users for a while, so this is a pretty welcome change. It's easy to set up a client (I personally use a web client in a browser tab), and there's been a palpable jump in the level of discussion since the move.
Featured Streamer: Indie Beat TV
I'm going to go right out and say it– I'm a fool for music videos. I can't help it. I'm from the MTV Generation. I was born just a couple of years before MTV launched, and despite my parents having a serious aversion to it being on in the house, I still enjoyed sneaking looks at new wave bands in my childhood and, occasionally, waking up in the middle of the night to catch a favorite band on 120 Minutes in my teen years. I've also always had an interest in film and video, dating back to my first stop motion animation on 8mm film when I was 7. When the big Internet video explosion took off in the mid-00s, my dream was to eventually produce a few music videos.
As someone who primarily watches Owncast streams through a Roku, I admit that I don't often frequent the 24/7 radio station streams. It's nothing personal; I just don't like to tie up a large screen in the room unless the visuals are as compelling as the audio. So, of course, when I came across a post from the Network of Hope and Assocation in Music (NHAM) announcing they would be launching a major collaborative project to produce "the MTV of the Fediverse", I was ecstatic. 2025 would open with the sad loss of Radio Free Fedi (RFF), but it would close with the launch of a massive new collective to bring 24/7 independent music videos to the Fediverse.
Launching just before the new year to fanfare and a rabidly engaged audience, The Indie Beat TV (TibTV) has been on a serious roll. The videos are at a level beyond by expectations, they feature QR codes for rapid artist discovery, and the network has a rolling daily schedule based on genre. With station ID spots and bumpers, TibTV came out of the gate as more than a stream but a complete station. And it comes along at a time when MTV is shuttering the last of its actual music stations worldwide. It's really a welcome to have a stream that's always available, always showing some of the best content of Fediverse creators, and that feels like something I, the viewer, am in gentle conversation with.
No surprise that there's been a steady trickle of posts announcing new artists who've chosen to take their content to TibTV.
Even more heartening, though, has been getting a glimpse into the high level of collaboration that's gone into this project. The loss of RFF taught the entire the community a difficult lesson about what can happen when a massive public project is invisibly held aloft by one person. TibTV came to life as a collaboration between The Independent Beat, NHAM, and multiple independent artists with a passion for both independent music videos and improving artist discovery. They're too many to elegantly acknowledge in inline prose, but I want to share some of their own thoughts on the project:
"[C]orporate consolidation may have greatly hindered the video star and the weird world of music video as an art form, but it isn’t dead yet. In the silence following “Video Killed the Radio Star”, the first and last video to be broadcast on MTV, a faint murmur could be heard. Not a hum, not the noise of static, but the cogs whirring in the minds of those who want to keep that experimental spirit alive and the sound of a hundred cameras being dusted off for The Indie Beat TV." –Roberta Fidora
"I was seeing all of these great videos on Peertube with 8 or 10 views and I thought: this is criminal, this has to change, people need to see these videos. This had to exist and now it does." --Limebar
"So inspiring: A lot of real and virtual cameras being dusted off right now…" --Sknob
"TIBtv is a dream come true for me as a music lover. But it’s also possibly the best project I’ve ever had the privilege to play a small part in. That’s because of the people who made it happen and the way they made it happen. I’ll never feel more inspired than I do as a part of this group." –Mizkirsten
"We CAN have nice things." --Meljoann
The newsletter also wants to acknowledge the efforts of Sam from NHAM and indie artists and technologists keefmarshall and axwax. I didn't get quotes from them, but their efforts in developing TibTV, curating videos, and rallying the community were indispensable to the founding of the project.
It's important to remember that it's not enough to blaze a trail if you don't leave behind a path for others to follow. TibTV has been sure to follow this principle from the beginning, and their tech stack and documentation can be found on Codeberg, which will certainly aid others in scheduling and planning their next 24/7 Owncast system.
Last and certainly not least, please remember that no big project can sustain in the long run without community support. Everyone who loves good music videos can do a little something to keep TibTV humming. Make content, support the artists, be part of the community, and don't be afraid to step up! Everyone in this project, at some point, had no idea what they were doing, so it doesn't matter if you don't, either!
Closing Remarks
This newsletter is something done with love by a single person, but it tries to reflect back a community I find important. I don't have help locating events, building a calendar, or even getting quotes for the articles. I rely extensively on people in the community sharing their announcements and stories with me. Please, if you want to see something in the newsletter, get in touch with me. I might just decide to release an edition because of what you bring to me.
Additionally, if you'd like to help build the social fabric of the Owncast community, please consider checking out the #owncast-community channel on rocket.chat or the Owncast community on Lemmy.
Until then, be good to each other and keep the streams running!