Viewers further away are experiencing buffering

Because live video can have very narrow tolerances, it's possible that the physical location of viewers compared to the location of your server can cause enough delays that the viewer experiences buffering.

Relocate your server

You may have better luck running Owncast on a server that could be more centrally geographically located or has a connection to the world that is faster. If your server is physically distant from both you (to stream to) and your viewers (to consume video from) you may not be in the most optimal configuration.

Add additional lower output qualities

Adding additional, lower, qualities within your Owncast video configuration will give these people smaller video to download, therefore downloading faster and resulting in less buffering. Lower bitrate, framerate and resolution are available combinations of settings you can utilize to offer low quality options for your viewers.

Drawback: Adding additional qualities will result in using more hardware resources on your server, so keep an eye on your CPU usage as you make these changes.

After reading below you might also find helpful tips browsing the OBS Troubleshooting Guide, even if you don't use OBS.

The viewer will switch between qualities as needed

Using a technology called Adaptive Bitrate Streaming the viewer will switch transparently between different video qualities as needed. Read more about how this, and other pieces of video works by reading our more detailed Video Document.

Use external storage

If the core problem is your server isn't able to handle your number of viewers you can take advantage of 3rd party object storage providers so your viewers will download the video from there instead of your server. This means if you have 1 or 1000 viewers the video video traffic from your server will be exactly the same. Keep in mind each viewer will still be accessing your server directly for chat.

This allows you to generate the video on your Owncast server, but serve it from a provider who has unlimited bandwidth and capacity at a low cost.

With this setup you don't need extra CPU or a more powerful server in order to support more viewers, as they don't technically touch your server once the video begins.

Read more about configuring external storage with Owncast.

Use a CDN

To support more people all around the world a CDN (content delivery network) is generally the next step. Putting a CDN in front of your video allows your video to be distributed by servers that are geographically closer to the viewer.

Read more about using a CDN with Owncast.