Why we built Polycast

Every multistream tool I tried put a server between me and the people watching. I got tired of renting that server, so we built the opposite.

Here's the setup all of them ship: you send your stream to their cloud, their cloud re-encodes it, and their cloud fans it out to YouTube, Twitch, and wherever else. You pay every month whether you went live once or thirty times. And the quality you get to push is whatever your weakest platform can handle.

That last part is the one that got me.

The thing cloud multistream gets wrong

When a hosted service takes your one stream and splits it to five platforms, it's re-encoding on its own servers. That gets expensive fast, so they keep your input modest and send roughly the same thing everywhere.

You end up capped at the lowest common denominator. Twitch tops out around 6000 kbps, so you set 6000 and YouTube quietly gets 6000 too, even though it would happily take a lot more. You're paying a monthly bill to send YouTube a worse stream than it can handle.

I didn't want a cheaper version of that. I wanted to delete the middle entirely.

One encoder per destination

Polycast runs a dedicated encoder for every place you're streaming to. 1440p60 to YouTube. 1080p60 to Twitch. 1080p30 to LinkedIn. Each one is set up for the platform it's feeding, and they all run at the same time on your machine.

There's nothing clever about it. It's how broadcast has worked for forty years: one encoder per output, one path per destination. Cloud multistream tried to hide that, and the quality leaks out every time you actually care about it.

If your hardware can produce it and the platform can take it, you send it.

It runs on your machine, not ours

Polycast is starting out as a desktop app, but we're building a version where you can run it on your own VPS too. Your stream keys live on your computer and get used on your computer. None of it touches our infrastructure, because we don't have any infrastructure sitting in the path of your stream.

You own it, too. It's a one-time purchase with a year of updates, not a subscription that bills you for existing. If we disappeared tomorrow, your copy keeps pushing to YouTube and Twitch until you decide to stop.

Where we're at

The macOS and Windows builds are working. Six destinations, a dedicated encoder per stream, presets you can configure. A headless version you can run on your own server is on the roadmap. We ship an LGPL-only build of FFmpeg so the licensing stays clean for everyone.

We're pre-launch, which is why this site exists before the product does. If you want one email the day Polycast ships (not a newsletter, just the one announcement), join the waitlist.

That's the whole reason it exists. Join the waitlist →

— Jay