I really want the music video channel to be a thing. I don’t know how to pay for it (or how much it’d cost). But the technology is sitting right there and works great imo…
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100% would watch an indie animation, film, etc channel. The LiquidSoap script is so doable. Could so easily have a 24x7 station going. A little bird told me RetroStrange is running 24x7 on Linode for around $20/month. I don’t know what the bitrates are or storage. You are gonna have costs for:
- owncast bandwidth and cpu
- liquidsoap bandwidth and cpu and storage
1Mbps at 720p looks pretty ok… and 3Mbps 720p looks great (in my limited testing)
and I know how to make a simplistic Roku app for them as well fwiw
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I know a lot of people use Owncast for 24-hour streams, do you reckon that’s the best thing for it? To me, the social aspect is the best thing about Owncast (chats, “gone live!” notifications, etc), but I dunno if I’m atypical in how I use it.
Had a quick look into discoverability options for, eg, Azuracast video, but I’m not really sure how it all works as I haven’t had a TV for a few decades!
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What would be the preferred way for folks to contribute? Would it be a monthly/yearly subscription, anytime donations or a fundraiser-style progress bar (could be set up with a monthly or quarterly funding goal to fund 24/7 programming and running costs)? Mirlo is doing a bit of work on fundraiser functionality currently so I don’t know if that’d be useful? It came up in a chat that Cory Doctorow funds his books this way.
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owncast seems right to me, federated, has a directory (https://owncast.directory/), seems under active development
EDIT: the directory seems to be getting better, looking more and more like Twitch and features a channel on the landing page… rotates. currently featuring https://swimrewind.com/
looking at their schedule… (all copyrighted material, btw)… they seem 24x7
I don’t have a discord login … maybe could poke around and see if they have costs outlined
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Are we talking about bringing back music TV as a 24/7 streaming channel using OwnCast?! A video equivalent of Radio Free Fedi? Yes please! I would so watch this, and I would encourage every musician and video artist I know to submit videos to add to the rotation.
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There’s so much that could be done with this. It’s very exciting! 
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Now I’m imagining a Liquid Television style animation and indie video mashup as an occasional segment on the VFF(1) livestream too. LiquidTV broke my brain (in a good way) when I was a teenager. Yeeharr!
(1) Video Free Fedi 
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Yeah, and I can see how folks could build commissioned animated shorts or livestream replays into the running costs over time (with permission). I’d love it if something like this encouraged indie animators to wander over and check out federated options too. I’ve seen nothing but negativity around having to post animation work on YouTube and TikTok but frustratingly, it’s still the main place to watch them. I wonder what the best way of getting the word out would be? There’s also the question of broadcast license stuff potentially, but @Mel knows more about that…
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P. S. Looks like it was briefly revived before they pivoted to reality TV guff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft0wCLHlzCc&list=PLBPLVvU_jvGuR9xrcDN77OhTojYJ9wZCm
I get it, at both ends. I don’t watching to be watching video on either platform, but I can access YouTub via liberated web apps (eg Invidio.us), and Android apps (eg NewPipe), and the same things I’ve said about my use of BandCamp apply here. There’s a huge library of stuff to access (too much, really), and search usually finds what I want, or something close enough.
I want PeerTube to be the federated YouTube, but I’ve seen it pitched as more like a federated Vimeo, and the comparison is apt. The UX of the default web app is pitched more at channel hosts than viewers.
As viewers, we need client apps built around finding and playing videos we want to see, by searching across the full videoverse. All services running PT, OwnCast, Loops, etc, but also video uploaded to any other federated service. And filtering video intelligently, by grouping together short video, TV-style series, feature length content, and live-to-air marathons, in interfaces suitable to those different durations.
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I still very occasionally lurk on Reddit and a lot of recent comments on the PeerTube community relate to it being difficult or intimidating to join as a viewer. I also asked in the animation community whether anybody was using PeerTube and it didn’t get a single response. 
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yeah that’s what I’m hoping for… working with mizkirsten to see if the indie beat can host it but also mel is looking at options for hosting and paying
in the test script I made for LiquidSoap i’ve included an “eye candy” in regular rotation which is meant to be super short form inserts between videos… but you can see from the script it is easy to schedule program time slots and would be easy to insert a regular animation show
I don’t know how this all comes together I’m hoping mizkirsten and/or mel can figure out the hosting side (i’m very amateur at linux and hosting) but I think I’ve confirmed that LiquidSoap → Owncast is the technology
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This all looks amazing! I’m not technical in the slightest but as I said before, if I can make anything to help test it out in terms of idents or test card screens, let me know!
Copying in @simon about the funding page thing too. A few of the Mirlo folks have been chatting about whether to make fundraiser functionality part of Mirlo or spin it off as it’s own thing (or both) and I wanted to ask you and Kirsten @TheIndieBeat whether it’d be useful for anything you guys are doing? I saw a stream at Radio Free Fedi fest where there was a funding progress bar at the bottom and thought it was a great idea (and other people seemed to think so too - it hit the target set!).
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Also, if you’ve got any thoughts about finding animators on fedi and need any help with that, then shout!
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Yeah I’d be completely happy to sysadmin this and implement your liquidsoap solution! Putting it in the grant application, submitting by end of this month and hopefully get a decision two months after that…
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in the meantime, mizkirsten is hopefully able to get a staging server going this weekend so we can see what’s what
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Bringing all this exciting talk of video streaming back to the topic of discoverability, I had a quick skim of @limebar 's thread about LiquidSoap and saw a comment about how their motivation is artist discovery. Which I think was the original goal of MTV too, before enshittification dynamics kicked in.
Maybe something worth discussing here is the UX of seeing a video on VFF, wanting to learn more about either the musical artist or those involved in the video, and clicking through to find them. How could integrations with BandWagon or Mirlo help them find more songs? How could integrations with PeerTube or loops.video help them find crew details for the video?
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I loved the way the RFF site displayed the artists’ links in the “now playing” box. I wonder could we embed something similar on the Owncast site?
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Couple of thoughts… azuracast has a way to publish “now playing” json. The Indie Beat for example (and RFF before) published that and I was able to pick that up to feed into the Roku channel (to display artist link as QR code) and for the indie beat now playing bot: Now Playing on The Indie Beat (@tibrnowplayingbot@mastodon.social) - Mastodon and make a fedi wall of it (Fediwall) …
Now in the LiquidSoap script I am pulling metadata tags from the MP4 files and putting that info onscreen including the artist WWW link as a QR code. Since this metadata is there in the stream… I am wondering if owncast has a similar function to output json.
If so, that could be parsed up and displayed in the chat or on a page on owncast site or… in a bot… or something. Not sure what owncast supports. Another thought is .. the LiquidSoap script could certainly output something but it would need to be coded… so if owncast already has it so much the better.
I wanted to get a QR onscreen in the stream because that way wherever the stream is consumed (like in a roku app, owncast directory site, etc.) it would be visible. Beyond that tho, there could be options.
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