boltstream VS lasercrabs

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 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. Just turn the stream off, ban the account, and then reply to the email. But it just got too annoying. I built a little mobile web app so I could just do it from my phone while I was out at dinner. After awhile I just decided that it was time to give it to someone else to play with. So I did a big code dump on Github and haven't touched it since.

I've actually started working on it a little bit more recently since it seems that "self hosted video streaming" is still pretty in-demand. I'm probably not going to be spending too much time on the actual features and functionality since that's pretty much done at this point. Mostly just packaging it up so it's easier for people to run it themselves and hack on it.

[0] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream

My go-to example for collecting a set of libs together to make a game is Evan Todd's lasercrabs AKA DECEIVER. Check out the external folder on github: Assimp, Bullet, Recast, SDL, wwise, etc.

Not sure if Lemma by Evan Todd was commercially successful, but it's OpenSource. Also this project by him which had a different name earlier, but he cancelled the release.