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!