In the past we put on live streamed talks/tutorials/workshops which were generally well received, but they became a big coordination burden on our small team and we eventually dropped them.
Feedback was mostly great, and barring some technical issues here and there people usually loved them, but it was hard to pull off.
We'd love for our platform to be a destination for live sharing, be it live coding, office hours, or anything like that.
So I think it would be great if we re-visited the idea of allowing folks to go live on their own. They'd all-of-a-sudden just be live on the platform and anyone could pop in to say hi.
Because there are other platforms which specialize in live streaming, the best approach may just be to allow people to broadcast from there. Alternatively we could go with a native solution. I could see either being an option, and it's a conversation we should have.
We have our own chat infrastructure, and I think if launched this, it would be nice if we used our community chat alongside whichever solution we go with. That would allow us to moderate that interaction within our ecosystem.
I don't think this could be a core team priority any time soon, which is why I'm putting this out for feedback. If people from the community are excited about this, I think it could be a nice community-driven initiative. Of course, if folks from the community want to run with this, we'll be available to help push it through and make sure it stays on track with the platform's direction and needs.
Some points/questions to consider:
- We could allow embed of Twitch/YouTube/etc.
- We could broadcast within our own solution (provided by some cloud provider).
- Building our own is the coolest long term path because we're open source and could evolve it in really interesting ways.
- If we do embed from another user-facing service, would we colocate it with our own chat?
- I think the design of how we display folks who are currently live and stuff like that are not important details upfront.
- If we build it natively into the platform, what cloud services seem best for this? Several of our existing infrastructure partners have relevant offerings for low-latency live streaming, but differentiating them is easier said than done.
If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them!
Latest comments (22)
We could do it the moxer way, with 8-second clips.
I’d be curious to hear if folks would be interested in some sort of integration with VS Live Share, that would allow you to publish live collaboration sessions, and interact with the community in a potentially more immersive way.
I know of plenty of podcasters who would love this feature. You have to drag your audience over to YouTube/Facebook/Twitch if you want to do any broadcasting but I'm sure many of us would prefer a dev oriented space (especially one as friendly as Dev.To).
I made a Github Issue
github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/...
to further discuss this and potential implementations! Would love anyone who might want to assist to join in on the issue!
I would be super interested in this.
I actually think there would be a lot of value to see different peoples work flows and let them explain as they go.
I often struggle writing because I have to try and remember to stop and write. The ability to live stream means I could just talk it out, which is what I do most of the time.
I think you should just integrate YouTube and/or Twitch.
Since dev.to already uses twitter- Including Twitter Live might be an option!
I really can't help with the technical questions, but I do have to say I'd be excited for this! I occasionally stream code work on twitch, but it's geared towards higher view counts instead of more interesting comments, and so far dev.to has been full of really insightful people. I'd rather have 1 person from here to talk to during a stream then 10 people on twitch who are looking for something completely different. There's still the science and technology category on twitch if you wanted to do embeds, but it would be nice if dev.to had it's own more specific tagging system for video steams.
Edit: How hard would it be to integrate the chat with something like restream.io?
I think this would be great! I've tried streaming a few times before and twitch works fine but having something tailored to devs sounds awesome!
I'd definitely use it, and am probably down to write some code to support this!
Embeds would be so rad. Twitch especially.