There is a lot of reason for making a 24/7 lives at your YouTube channel. You could do it with some paid services, but honestly I think there are some better options.

Ant Media is open source WebRTC streaming platform, it has plenty features, but all I need for now is uploading some video music streams and connecting it to the YouTube, so it plays indefinitely.

I dont like using someone else cloud, so I deployed it on my Proxmox server using Docker, installing is straight-forward as the developer shares is on the Docker Hub.

Video

Sadly h.265 and hardware decoding is reserved only for paid subscription users, they do share for free for academic institutions, all you need is to send them a message from your school’s email, at least I’ve tried as every single message I send from that account got blocked by automatic spam filter, after contacting them from my personal email, I’ve got no response, so we are stuck with free version now.

It means that I need to export files as h.264 meaning they will be slightly larger and quality will be worse, but not a huge deal. The bigger issue is software decoding, as my server isn’t exactly high end, it does put a lot of strain on CPU, but for now it will work,

So after preparing some music mixes ~30m long I’ve uploaded them on my AntMedia container, put them as looping playlist, and connected it to my YouTube channel using token, and that’s pretty much it, stream works fine, no connection issues or lags, everything works fine, my server is a bit toasty and draws more power than usual, but otherwise nothing to complain on.

Alternatives

Services

• https://www.livereacting.com/pricing - $350/mo
• https://upstream.so/#pricing - 1 stream - 30/mo, 8 streams - $160/mo
• https://gyre.pro/ - 1 stream - 39/mo, 8 streams - $169/mo
• https://permastream.io/#pricing - $30/mo
• https://www.streamingbots.com/ - $30/mo
• https://streamer.bot/

Well they are all quite expensive, compared to my $70 server idling on 4W of power, so not only we are saving plenty of money but also, keeping the full control over our files!

FFmpeg

AntMedia server is great, but it’s overkill, it is enterprise tools after all, for large scale solutions and no compromises and reliability. And I don’t really need all that much, so I will be switching to something like

PyLivestream. It should be as easy to deploy using LXC, and it will resolve my issue with hardware decoding, yet we are to see about scalability of these things, as I’m planning on expanding my channels. I’m also hoping for being able to set up radio stream instead of video streams, meaning I won’t need to upload huge video files, and I will have more control over it, but we will see.