Twitch and YouTube Live, replaced by infrastructure you control: Owncast is a self-hosted live streaming and chat server. Point OBS, Streamlabs, or any RTMP-capable broadcaster at the server's ingest port, and Owncast transcodes the feed with FFmpeg into HLS with multiple quality variants, playing it in a built-in web page with a real-time chat beside it. Chat supports anonymous participation, custom emotes, and moderation tools - message removal, user bans and suspensions - with optional authentication via IndieAuth or a Fediverse account. ActivityPub integration puts the stream on the Fediverse: viewers on Mastodon and compatible services can follow a channel and get notified the moment it goes live. Video delivery can come straight off the server or offload HLS segments to S3-compatible object storage so a modest VPS handles thousands of concurrent viewers while only managing ingest and chat. The backend is a single Go binary with a React frontend - no accounts platform, no database server, no dependency stack - and the player embeds in any website. MIT-licensed, with roughly 9k GitHub stars, zero platform fees, and no algorithm or takedown policy between you and your audience.

The fediverse's answer to YouTube comes from French non-profit Framasoft: PeerTube is a TypeScript/Angular video platform where hundreds of independently operated instances federate over ActivityPub into one network. Videos you publish are discoverable across the whole video fediverse, and viewers can follow your channels from Mastodon or any ActivityPub platform - or plain RSS - without needing an account on your instance. The namesake innovation attacks video hosting's core cost problem: alongside HLS delivery, an optional WebRTC-based P2P layer lets concurrent viewers' browsers share video segments with each other, so a video going viral distributes its own bandwidth demand instead of crushing your server; instance redundancy extends this by letting friendly instances cache each other's videos. Livestreaming is first-class - stream via OBS or any RTMP software, host permanent streams, enable replays, and interact through live chat. Creators get channels, playlists, analytics, built-in video editing (trim, watermark), and an embeddable player for any website. There are no ads, no data mining, and no recommendation algorithm engineered for watch-time - the project's explicit design stance. Admins control federation policy, P2P settings, and theming; a plugin system extends the rest. AGPL-licensed, 300+ contributors, in active development since 2015.

The moment after ShadowPlay saves a great clip is what Fireshare was built for: your friends see it now, not after a YouTube upload, processing queue, and platform terms review. Drop videos into a watched folder and this Flask/React application generates a unique shareable URL for each one, complete with Open Graph metadata - so pasting the link into Discord, Twitter, or Slack produces a proper embed with title, description, and video thumbnail instead of a raw URL. Viewers need no account and no app. Visibility is per-file: public (browseable on your feed), private (unlisted, reachable only by direct link), or password protected. For game clips specifically, Fireshare organizes automatically - clips sort by game with cover art pulled from SteamGridDB, no manual tagging - while tags and full-library search cover everything else. Optional transcoding (CPU or GPU) creates lower-quality renditions so viewers on weak connections get automatic quality adaptation, and video cropping trims clips in place. The extras round out a genuinely finished tool: view counters, timestamped share links, a shuffle button, restrictable uploads, Discord notifications for new videos, an RSS feed of the public feed, mobile support, and LDAP for multi-user setups. No storage limits, no watermarks, no platform deciding what stays up. GPL-licensed.

Point Emby at your movie, music, and photo libraries and it becomes a private streaming service: metadata and artwork arrive from TMDB and TVDB, everything lands in a polished browsable interface, and media transcodes on the fly whenever a client can't play the original format. The client reach is the selling point: native apps span Android TV, Apple TV, Google TV, Fire TV, Roku, LG and Samsung smart TVs, iOS, Android, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, plus web browsers and desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and DLNA devices are auto-detected for casting and remote control. Multi-user support gives each household member their own account, watch history, favorites, and recommendations, with genuinely capable parental controls: content restrictions, access schedules, time limits, and live monitoring with remote control of kids' sessions. Live TV works with hardware tuners like HDHomeRun or M3U playlists, with free guide data in the US, Canada, and UK. The server and core features are free; an optional Premiere key adds hardware-accelerated transcoding, DVR recording, offline sync, and Cinema Mode intros.

Point OBS or a hardware encoder at Restreamer's built-in RTMP or SRT ingest and it serves your website while rebroadcasting to YouTube Live, Twitch, Facebook, Vimeo, TikTok, LinkedIn, PeerTube, and anything else that accepts RTMP, SRT, or HLS - a complete self-hosted live-streaming server from datarhei. That multistreaming normally costs a monthly Restream.io subscription; here it's one FFmpeg process per destination on your own hardware. The web UI is genuinely approachable, with a wizard that walks beginners through camera setup, while professionals get the full surface: multiple audio/video inputs (USB, RTSP network cameras, virtual devices), codec and processing settings, separate audio muxing, and hardware acceleration via Nvidia CUDA, Intel VAAPI, or Raspberry Pi. Serving your own audience is first-class - a built-in Video.js player embeds in your site, a ready-made publication website streams without any embedding work, HLS chunk sizes are tunable, and automatic Let's Encrypt handles HTTPS. Viewer and bandwidth monitoring with limits keeps traffic costs predictable, and it's GDPR-friendly: no third-party provider, no audience data stored. A fully Swagger-documented REST API drives automation. SRT support keeps latency under a second.