Hey guys, I'm David, one of the founders of Dextro. Happy to answer any questions about how we got this to work technically!<p>At a high level, here's how we did it:
1) We're using the Twitter Streaming API to find every publicly accessible live-stream.
2) We extract the live stream using a version of PhantomJS that still supports Flash.
3) Each live stream is being sent to Dextro's livestream API endpoint, which streams back chunked JSON of what's happening in the stream in real time. (Check out some low level outputs at <a href="http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/imagecache/slideshow_large/slideshow/2015/05/3045926-slide-s-1-underthehood1024.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/imageca...</a>)
4) The results are aggregated and sent on a pub/sub socket to each client.<p>A background task crunches the live data into the "most viewed" and "most streamed" aggregate stats.