The Old Timey Computer Show migrated from Twitch to a fully independent, self-hosted Owncast instance on September 2, 2025. The Owncast Newsletter is an unofficial source for developments and streams of interest in the Owncast ecosystem. The Old Timey Computer Show was featured in the issue published November 11, 2026, a little over a year after it entered the community after the Twitch channel closed last August. The newsletter contains abridged comments from the e-mail interview the author conducted with me. Below are the full unedited questions and answers from that interview, which includes historical background that has not been published on this site before.

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When did you start OTCS, and what made you decide to do it?

I started The Old Timey Computer Show on 18 May 2019. It was motivated by three simultaneous factors:

• A discussion about the old BBC documentaries about computers from the 1980s, which were termed "old timey British computer shows". 
• The abundance of 24/7 Twitch channels at the time showing topics like cartoons, TV series, and movies, with no regard for copyright.
• My own experience working for a digital signage provider, which I was laid off from a few months prior.

I've been using computers since my father bought an IBM PC around 1993 to bring work home. I've been passionate about computers and technology ever since, but it was only in the late 2010s when I learned about the Computer Chronicles and the BBC Computer Literacy documentaries. I was watching some of those 24/7 channels on Twitch at the time, and I thought it would be a fun experiment to make my own, and I had a subject that none of those channels were covering. With the help of people in a chatroom that was talking about old technology shows, I gathered up a few dozen hours worth of those shows and related programming and set up a test channel called The Old Timey British Computer Show on 18 May 2019. It ran on a SBC called the Atomic Pi that I bought because it ran Windows, with barely enough resources to run OBS. Within the first week, I started adding American shows like Computer Chronicles and dropped the "British" part of the title. It was a crude setup, which crashed every few days but ran well enough as a proof of concept. Within the first year, I pulled out a Raspberry Pi 4 from cold storage and wrote some custom Python scripts to run ffmpeg to stream directly to Twitch's RTMP ingest. This was largely to conserve electricity compared to the Atomic Pi, which needs a daughterboard to provide power and has very little vendor and community support compared to Raspberry Pi. It's been running from that same Raspberry Pi ever since. For most of the first year, the channel averaged around 3 viewers a day, with up to 7 on a good day. That was still enough to keep me motivated to run the channel, because at least those 3-7 people had something to watch when they could have been watching anything else or nothing at all. The first major name to discover the channel and raid it was Vektroid Live, a vaporwave artist, whose audience would have a very high interest in what OTCS was showing at the time. Before long, more and more localized communities started hearing of the channel, and it peaked in viewership within a few years.

How did you come to have your vast collection of videos, and how do you manage it and curate it?

I gather videos simply by searching YouTube and the Internet Archive for computer and video game-related videos originally produced before the mid-2000s. I do this on a regular basis, at least once a month or so. I use JDownloader2 and yt-dlp to download the videos at the highest available quality, and on occasion I've had to reupload those copies when the original links break. Internet Archive has collections of VHS rips and films that make searching computer and video game keywords simpler, and there's a good number of YouTube channels out there that have small collections of their own. Those always lead to scouring the libraries of the original uploaders of those videos. I collect all of the source links in a Google Sheet, which serves to provide attribution to the uploaders. I did this from the beginning for multiple reasons: to ensure uploaders are credited by allowing viewers to find the links to their channels directly; to keep track myself of which shows are already added to the library; and to allow viewers to rewatch anything they see on the channel later.

I see in your annual reports that you use a "television channel format". Can you elaborate on what that means to you?

The digital signage company I mentioned in the first question marketed its flagship service as a pseudo-television channel, similar to closed circuit television. It created content for specific industries in the United States, with its own proprietary video player boxes that received regularly updated blocks of video for a given niche. These were rebranded mini PCs with a very small form factor, which mount near a TV that's expected to be powered on 24/7. The programming was exactly 8 hours in length, to the second, which played in a continuous loop until it was replaced by a new block of video from the main server. 

OTCS runs on an open-source, free software clone of that company's product created by me, at https://github.com/TheOpponent/mr-otcs. The blocks of video that get played each day are approximately 8 hours played three times a day, a total of 24 hours with a few minutes of margin of error since all of the media is found rather than created for it. This is both in consideration for time zones worldwide and the format of my old company's programming. The programming changes out once a day, rather than whenever new content is ready. The schedule is rewritten when I've gathered enough new content.

I see OTCS primarily as a tool to give these preserved audiovisual artifacts greater visibility, because the ultimate purpose of preserving them is to make sure they can be seen at all. The efforts of the people who find and preserve this material cannot be overstated, and we owe them all for helping to form a more complete history of how technology was discussed, not just how it developed. Even then, much of what they upload only gets seen by people seeking it out, and that's a privilege only enjoyed by videos of high-interest topics related to the largest names in technology and video games. As an example, the Distinguished Lecture Series of talks about technology topics at the university level is available on the Internet Archive, and none of them had more than a few hundred views at the time I collected them for the channel. I'm positive now that all of them have gotten much more visibility now that they're presented in a live stream on a schedule, with people able to discuss the lecture topics and how they've been applied in the real world since then. The single most common comment I've observed is present-day technology topics being discussed much, much earlier than people realize. I have found that every single talking point in computer technology for as long as OTCS has been online, without exception, has a basis in videos that are covered by its library. The axiom that nothing under the sun is new applies to computers as well. As I write this, the biggest technology headlines regard the new wave of artificial intelligence, and there are videos that discuss procedurally generated computer images and voices, computers automating mundane labor, and other such concerns going back to at least the 1980s that echo debates happening right this second. Some of the first videos that were added to OTCS were British documentaries from the early 1980s about computers becoming sophisticated enough to automate human work, and the promises that computers will give people more free time to pursue anything else they would rather be doing. A lot of those shows were expressly skeptical about computers doing these things for the long term, and I always think about those shows when attitudes about technology growth shift. I feel that I have an atypical view about these topics as a result of curating and watching these shows as a programming director for a niche television channel. With that said, I never try to deliberately "counter-program" the schedule or otherwise try to time the airing of any particular video with current goings-on. Anything currently showing that seems overly salient is purely coincidental, and a byproduct of my aim to keep subjects rotating as frequently as possible.

Criticisms I often get regarding the channel's programming include shows that seem to play more frequently than anything else (a perception that flies in the face of my effort to avoid exactly that), and some shows are not in English and therefore can't be readily used as background noise. As I treat OTCS like a television channel, not everything it carries is going to be to every viewers' tastes. This is by design because I want to show as many different kinds of programmes as possible that fit the channel's niche, along with a small number of my own arbitrary additions that still fit in some way because it is, after all, my own project. (This is the motivation for including stage shows based on video games, which are sometimes criticized for being played too often even though they are shown at most once every 25 days. To that I say I don't have enough of them, because there is limited information about them in English-language resources.) My response to these comments is to open the schedule page, look up when the current show will end, and come back after it's over. This was one of the motivations of the schedule feature, that viewers want to see what's coming up later in the broadcast day and should have a chance to prepare to watch it. Unlike most television channels, it also includes the names of shows that were broadcast in the last few hours, so viewers can look them up after they're finished.

Finally, in the early days I considered adding related commercials for computer products and video games in between shows to make it feel more like a TV channel. I decided against it, because the last thing I want to do with OTCS is commercialize it or even give the impression that I would try to profit from this preserved material, even if it's on theme and even if it's pretending to. I was even against allowing people to donate to the channel at first even as people asked to do so, because I felt that if anything, that money ought to go to the Internet Archive and other entities that make the original video assets available for all, but ultimately this is a hobby and I simply can't afford to run it from my own pocket indefinitely. The sponsors on Patreon and Ko-fi are a big help in offsetting the costs of hosting it myself, the bandwidth I share with other people in the building, and the electricity of running both the Raspberry Pi 4 and the file server that houses the videos 24/7/365. Welcoming the support of Viewers Like You is a factor in its continued existence even now.

Other than your annual surveys, how do you engage with your audience, and what do you know about them?

I have to admit that after seven years of running the channel, observing the chat, conducting annual surveys, and looking around on social media and other places for feedback on the channel that doesn't go directly to me, I don't have a comprehensive grasp on what my exact demographics are or what my audience expects from the channel. The best I can tell is that the majority of the regular viewers are similar to myself: based in North America, between age 30-54, a vested interest in technology and/or video games, and sometimes working in technology fields. While this represents what I think is the largest demographic of the channel, I'm most curious about the worldwide audience that doesn't speak English as their first language. I've seen the occasional post from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union link to the channel while talking about their own history with computers. Those are my favorite posts, because once OTCS grew to the audience size it has now, it became a community for viewers to exchange their personal histories with computers. It's an outcome I didn't really expect when I started putting together a playlist of BBC documentaries for communal viewing just to see if I could. I really want to find media about computers from more underrepresented regions of the world like South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia outside of Japan, to encourage even more discussion of this kind from more audiences that are rarely in the conversation of technology history. This of course requires that anything from those places was preserved.

A mild tangent: Starting in 2024, I included a question in the surveys regarding what media should be considered "old timey". I got a wide variety of answers, but the official stance of OTCS is that it's a shifting window that will move forward as the years pass. Technology is a story that's constantly developing, and so should anyone covering its history. Within the next few years, OTCS will host the earliest video podcasts and more material originally distributed on DVD. I see a lot of resistance any time media from more than about a decade ago is touted as "vintage" or "retro" for various reasons, but I don't agree with any of it. I'm of the view that this older media maintaining relevance and sentimental value for this long is nothing but a cause for celebration, not despair that time is passing. I don't just mean this as an OTCS answer, but something that everyone reading this should consider when they're interfacing with any kind of media that can be considered old. I always love learning via history telling itself and I wish the viewers can learn to do this too. I started OTCS over seven years ago and it's been, without exaggeration, the most successful endeavor I've ever undertaken in my life. I may have put more money and time into it than anything other than my film degree, but it's the most valuable thing I've ever created with that degree.

What have been the challenges you've had, both during your Twitch and Owncast years?

The challenge that takes the most time is charting the schedule. To build on the previous answer, because I know so little about my viewers, I can only use myself as a model for what viewers want to see. I personally value variety and dislike repetition in scheduled content, so I put a lot of restrictions on how the schedule is charted. To keep the channel from feeling stale, I chart 350 days' worth of programming. As I wrote in a previous question, each day has a hand-crafted block of programming of approximately eight hours, repeated three times. Originally the schedule was only 50 days, then 100, then 150, then 250, and now 350 as the video library grew, so every single video I curated can be shown multiple times per loop. I have a self-imposed rule to not repeat any individual shows more than once in a 14-day period, because if I was a viewer and not the owner, I wouldn't like it if there were "reruns" so soon. It takes weeks to chart the schedule, as I have to ensure that continuous series are played in order and certain subjects don't get shown too frequently. In particular, early tapes of the Internet and the World Wide Web are extremely common and all cover the same material, so I pay special attention to spread those videos out as far as I can.

Besides charting the schedule, the majority of time I spend working on OTCS is preparing the videos themselves. As I wrote above, one of the guiding visions for OTCS is "history telling itself". I use video editing software to clean up the video as much as possible and make it presentable, as closely to its original form as possible. This entails tasks like fixing aspect ratios to exact 4:3 (that is, exactly 640x480 in a 852x480 frame, cropping and stretching the source wherever this isn't the case), color correction, audio level normalization (which is sometimes as simple as adjusting volume to a single common maximum, or in the worst cases doing this multiple times across a single recording), and deleting corrupted portions or anything that wasn't in the original presentation such as commercials and watermarks that only promote the uploader and not the copyright holder(s). Sometimes a video would be missing a whole section of audio, usually on YouTube where a copyrighted song was removed, and on occasion there's a different copy elsewhere with correct audio, so I have to combine multiple uploads of the same video to form a complete copy. After all of this, I then add the title of the video and any other important metadata in the pillarboxes. The survey results consistently report that this information is valuable, but even if it wasn't, I would still make sure every common question about any given piece of media is answered before anyone thinks to ask it. I research the exact title, original title if it's not in English, and the year and/or broadcast date to the best of my ability for every individual video. I've been doing this from day 1, and I believe that including this information without anyone needing to ask for it first and possibly not getting an answer is what sets it apart from almost every other 24/7 channel. I do the same with my own Twitch channel where I stream games, by including the game name, year of release, developer and publisher, and platform at the bottom in a visible place, to answer all of the common questions about the game being played before they're asked. Very few people ask in the chat as a result. On occasion I get some details wrong like the release year or translated title, or a higher quality encoding of a video gets uploaded later, so I will always take the effort to re-encode in the name of optimal presentation.

The biggest advantage to streaming on Twitch was the ability for any channel to introduce their audiences to OTCS using raids. There is no equivalent for this on Owncast or self-hosted services in general, so the only means to grow the channel now is word of mouth. While the daily average viewership is only slightly lower than it was on Twitch in its final years, I am not observing any growth like I saw on Twitch. My own influence is negligible, so I have to mention OTCS on my own channels as frequently as I can, which is difficult for me due to my aversion to self-promote and potentially get backlash for uncalled-for shilling. Even then, I still find a former viewer of the Twitch channel unaware that it was closed down or that it has a new home on occasion to this day.

Aside from the challenges with discoverability you mentioned in the annual survey, what's been your experience with Owncast?

I tried to run Owncast on my previous VPS, which I've had for many years at that point, but after a period of closed testing, it became clear that my server plan wasn't up to the task of continuous video encoding and broadcasting. I had to upgrade the server, and my hosting costs with it, but many of the regular viewers on Twitch quickly found the new site. Shortly before the Twitch channel was suspended indefinitely, I added a notice to the dynamic schedule page with a link to the channel in case it was to change, because I got feedback that some people bookmark that schedule page to see if they wanted to watch whatever is playing on a given day. Those people asked for a direct link to the channel for convenience, and I saw the obvious opportunity for it to inform viewers of the channel migrating. Days after I added the link, the Twitch channel was shut down, and OTCS was offline for a month as I searched for a new home for it. As I wrote in my 7th annual retrospective, I was ready for this inevitability because Twitch wasn't designed for this kind of channel and they need to protect their own interests with copyright holders, but in hindsight I could have done the research sooner and reduced that downtime.

What's your Owncast setup? How well does it support the viewer base?

I run Owncast from source code to make a single change from the binary version, a custom "stream offline" video to match what I had on Twitch. Since the channel started on Twitch, I use a custom theme to make the Owncast channel resemble Twitch as much as possible, for the sake of the viewers who migrated from Twitch and want a familiar viewing experience on a new server. Some respondents in the annual surveys said they watched the Twitch channel by opening an app on a smart device or TV, and I found that opening the current Owncast page in a browser works on both mobile devices in full screen mode and televisions that have web browser apps, which will hopefully help with anyone who needs to migrate those setups. It also has a direct M3U8 link for users of that protocol, such as games focusing on roleplaying that allow opening video links and watching them in the game world.

What would you like to see from the Owncast next? From the community at large?

Most of the pain points I've had with migrating from Owncast is features I took for granted from Twitch that have no equivalents here. I'm running Owncast from source solely to customize the brief video when the stream ends, because I want to use the same graphic I used on Twitch when the channel was offline, which was usually due to the Raspberry Pi losing internet access until I solved it. It's not as customizable as I was hoping, but at least the possibility of changing what I want is there, even if doing so requires more effort than implied in the documentation. I'm hoping Owncast will allow for more personalization in future versions, particularly a graphic for the offline message rather than a single line of text. I also want to be able to replace the built-in chat with an external chat, possibly an embedded Discord text channel or even IRC, because I find the built-in moderation tools are very spare compared to Twitch. With that said, the chat feature was one of the biggest attractions of Owncast to me when I was evaluating my options, and it's much better than having no chat at all. At least one viewer has given me feedback about frustration with using it, however, due to issues with staying authenticated. Using a service that other users are more likely to be using already could help with this.

Do you have a presence on the Fediverse?

I'm not looking to expand my social presences so what I have now is what I intend to keep for the foreseeable future.