Opencast is built by a community of developers in collaboration with universities and organizations worldwide.

The Opencast Community was initiated by the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 to coordinate academic institutions, individuals, and companies interested in the production, management, and distribution of academic video.

The software project, originally named Opencast Matterhorn due to a meeting at ETH Zurich, saw 13 institutions from North America and Europe build a free, open-source software to produce, manage and distribute academic audio and video content, with a focus on lecture recordings.

With the end of the yearlong funding period, community and project set themselves up as an open-source initiative, driven by the various stakeholders (academic institutions, commercial partners).

Coinciding with the release of version 2.0 in the summer of 2015, "Opencast Matterhorn" was rebranded as "Opencast" to denote the end of the (Matterhorn) project and its transformation into an open source product.