Hey HN!!
Many of us enjoyed the "If YouTube had actual channels" Show HN post last week. As developers of a similar project, we wanted to share our approach to building a simulated live experience. We’ve spent around 18 months working on this and have managed to add some advanced features, including content-based interactivity. We are super excited to be releasing both the live stream and the code behind it.<p>Our idea was to combine the communal watching experience of television with the modern trappings of the interactive web. If you go to the stream, you will be watching along with everyone else. You can click around, get more information on what’s in the shot, and even purchase what you see without leaving the page.<p>On the tech side, we learned a ton along the way. Today, we are sharing the code so others can hopefully learn something too. To be totally honest, the code embarrasses me. It's way too early to share this and far from a completed open-source project. It’s an extreme example of “doing things that don’t scale” so please do not expect to just fire this up and run it in production. However, it does demonstrate solutions to a number of hard problems we faced—for example, handling graceful updates to streams that are currently live and supporting reliable timed metadata.<p>We would love any feedback and will be hanging around here to answer any questions that may come up.<p>Github: <a href="https://github.com/james-a-rob/KodaStream">https://github.com/james-a-rob/KodaStream</a><p>Live stream: <a href="https://www.sneakinpeace.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.sneakinpeace.com</a><p>Main tech: TypeScript | FFmpeg | HLS
The interactivity element is particularly exciting. I can see a lot of potential applications with not just shopping but edutainment. Appreciate it being written in Typescript as well!