Owncast

Donated Owncast servers

If you or your organization has content to share with the world, but doesn’t have the experience or resources required to run an Owncast server, we may be able to offer one, free of charge.

Our Goal

Aligning with our mission to create a streaming option that lives outside the large corporate services, we would like to offer a small number of free, hosted instances to streamers.

Our resources are limited, and we’ll be picky and start small. These servers will primarily be funded from whatever donations we have available.

Who would be a good candidate

  • A creative community who wants to share their music, art or performance.
  • A streamer already streaming on other platforms but wants to make the move to be more independent, or try something new.

Who wouldn’t be a good candidate

  • Somebody looking to aggressively monetize their stream, as Owncast does not currently focus on that, and that functionality does not exist out of the box.
  • A person who is technically able to easily run their own server.
  • An organization who can afford to have somebody run a server for them.

What we would ask of you

  • Be listed as a public streamer on our Directory where people would discover you.
  • Stream consistently enough to make it worthwhile for everyone involved, and that you expect to continue streaming into the future.
  • Plan on making an effort to build an audience.
  • Nothing NSFW or crazy offensive. As always, if you run your own server you can do whatever you like. But in this case we’ll be responsible for the servers and they’ll be shown to the general public, so we want the content to be generally accessible.
  • Work with us in providing feedback, testing new features, and being patient with any hiccups.

Disclaimers

Given this a donated service, used as a test bed for future Owncast functionality, we are unable to offer any service guarantees either in reliability, performance, or duration of what we’re offering. We will certainly keep you into the loop of any changes or downtime required. If you stop using the server it will be decommissioned.

We’re not a service provider, and this isn’t a hosting service. We’re just willing to do a little manual effort for people or groups who would benefit from it, in exchange for more independent streamers being in the world and growing the project.

Contact us

If all of that sounds good to you, and you’d like to talk more, you should reach out to us via these channels.

If you would like to help fund these servers, and the project as a whole, the Owncast project accepts donations via OpenCollective.