Twitch now officially sponsor OBS Studio development and more in the latest progress report

I honestly don't know where we would be without OBS Studio now, it's a fantastic bit of free and open source software for recording videos and doing livestreams. It seems Twitch agree.

Developer and OBS founder Hugh "Jim" Bailey, wrote a new progress report yesterday which goes over some thoughts on how they're doing. The first big point was how Twitch have started directly supporting OBS Studio (full announcement), as they've become a "Premiere" level sponsor which means they're pumping more than $50K a year into the project. It's not clear exactly how much, as the sponsor tiers only go up to "Diamond" which is $50K a year and Twitch are being listed above that level on the OBS contribute page.

Seems like OBS Studio is a reasonably well funded project with $1.2K monthly from Patreon, around $100K a year from their Open Collective campaign and now Twitch too for at least the $50K a year. It might sound like a lot but for a few developers, that kind of funding does disappear pretty quickly if they're working full time.

I never did look into the history of how OBS Studio came to be, which Bailey answered in the Twitch announcement:

When I first started the project back in 2012, I was a jobless idiot who watched a lot of Starcraft 2 streams, and wanted to stream it myself for fun. When I saw that there were no real serious open source projects out there for capturing, streaming, and recording, I decided to make my own tool, and make the tool the way I liked. I grew up programming along with my brother, and I always liked to write my own tools for fun and the challenge. Except this time, I decided to open source it, and that led me down the crazy path that we reached today. For the first time in my life, I've made something for myself, something I worked hard to achieve, and I've enjoyed it every step of the way.

That is really awesome. They saw a gap, they needed some software and so they made it themselves and kept it open source. Now it's likely one of the most popular open source applications around.

If you've been following recent OBS Studio releases the rest of the blog is likely not news to you. It goes over features they've been able to add in like pausing recording, browser source audio going through OBS, dockable browser panels and more.

There's a lot still to do though and pull requests start piling up whenever Bailey works on his own code. So it seems the project may go through a bit of a transition, with Bailey moving over to more of a managing role helping others and pulling in the code requests.

Linux even got a little mention:

Don't even get me started on macOS and Linux related stuff I want to see worked on. I've talked about that in previous blogs and we're still working on them. They always have to take reduced priority because not as many people use them. I'm not happy about that but when the vast majority of your users are on Windows, it's just the way things are.

Sadly that's the way everything goes, we see it in gaming all the time. Windows is the priority, Linux is often in second or third place or just forgotten about entirely. Perhaps if Bailey does spend more time on the managing side, more Linux related code can make it in from pull requests. Like the browser stuff, service integrations and more that the Linux version of OBS Studio is missing right now.

Anyway, to end on a much nicer high note, the future of OBS Studio and so easy video recording and livestreaming on Linux is now very bright.