Streaming Rugby Through a Self-Hosted RTMP Proxy with Docker and OBS

Last March, our office wanted to stream a rugby match — Highlanders vs Brumbies — to multiple monitors without juggling browser tabs or relying on flaky third-party streams. The problem: we needed one reliable ingestion point, the ability to record the stream, and the flexibility to push it to multiple destinations (local screens, recording storage, backup relay). No commercial streaming service gave us that level of control. We solved this by running our own RTMP proxy using nginx-rtmp-module in Docker, pulling the source stream with ffmpeg , and distributing it across our internal network. This isn't about piracy — it's about understanding media streaming infrastructure at the protocol level. You can use the same pattern for security camera feeds, internal presentations, or any scenario where you need to ingest, transcode, and redistribute live video. Why RTMP Still Matters RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) remains the workhorse protocol for live video ingestion. While HLS and DASH