Live Relay on TIBtv

Just a small update to report we have demonstrated now the ability to do a live relay on TIBtv https://tv.theindiebeat.fm of three Owncast instances without any major issues:

Live looked the best because live.theindiebeat.fm and tv.theindiebeat.fm occupy the same network space at Hetzner.

We can do any Owncast and theoretically any HLS stream. I’ve tested locally using a bunch of random live Owncast bcasts from https://owncast.directory but no other HLS sources – if someone can suggest a non-Owncast HLS, I’d give it a test.

Point being: we can relay music events where appropriate and desirable, with chat on, and with https://smol.stream/ emoji wall when wanted.

My hope is we can orchestrate an in person live event from someone’s show someday. I haven’t talked to the team about this but it is a hope that I have.

The configuration is like:

artist OBS → live.theindiebeat.fm → HLS → liquidsoap → tv.theindiebeat.fm

or

pre-recorded video → party.bonkwave.org → HLS → liquidsoap → tv.theindiebeat.fm

The nice thing about doing this is the built in audience for TIBtv. We have 900+ followers and routinely 10-20 viewers. When doing a relay, we can typically have a scrolling text appear on the bottom the screen indicating it is a live simulcast and viewer should go to XYZ server to chat.