boltstream

Several years ago I cobbled together all the pieces to make a live video streaming website [1] like Twitch.tv, et al. It's impossible to actually run at any kind of scale without being an ISP or Google-scale peer. Not to mention the enormous amount of DMCAs when people are trying to stream live sports, Pay-per-view, etc. It was fun to play with it for a couple months. But there's no business here. Twitch.tv is also finding that out. [1] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream

I released Boltstream [0] for exactly this kind of thing. It's not a Youtube replacement. It's a self-hosted replacement for Youtube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch.tv, and alike. [0] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream

I built Boltstream [0] over the course of a couple years and got burned out. I wouldn't say it was actually a failed project because in the back of my mind I never really had any intention of trying to turn it into a Twitch/YouTube/Facebook Live competitor anyway. And it's proven to be somewhat popular on Github. The project was fun to build and learn about but ultimately it was impossible to actually run it as a consumer-facing website. The problems were never the actual software/video streaming tech, but rather the extreme bandwidth costs of live video streaming, and the content itself. I launched it several times under different site names/products and it always just turned into a cesspool of pirate streaming live sports and other copyrighted content. The DMCA notices were regular, but were never really that onerous to deal with.

Indeed, I am certainly watching this space. Another “contender” is Boltstream [1] that was posted only a few weeks back. I am itching to take them all for a spin and kick tires! [1]: https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25328622

FWIW, the OP repo uses a Terraform config to deploy the server on a 4GBRAM server on DigitalOcean.[1] Which costs $20/mon and has 4TB/mon bandwidth allowance.[2] To give a sense of what a 4TB bandwidth could cover: 320 people watching a 3hr stream at 1080p or 70mb per minute. [1] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream/blob/master/terrafor... [2] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tools/bandwidth?activ...

This is really great. I've seen so many of these "self-hosted live video streaming" sites show up here and this is the first one that show the actual backend code. Usually they're just web frontends to some video streaming website. Questions: -[0] How widely deployed is this stack (specifically nginx rtmp/vod) around the live-streaming industry? -[1] You listed under the Feature that it support "Pay-per-view" and "Pay-per-minute" -- how exactly is that enforced if the playback is just regular HLS? (Are you checking every single request for a .TS segment in Django?) -[2] VOD/Recording is really cool but has enormous storage costs. How does BoltStream handle the long-term storage of streams? Edit: re [1] It looks like there's a somewhat sophisticated mechanism [here](https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream/blob/master/ansible/...) that's