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I work at a school with a campus in Texas and due to COVID-19, we created an interactive live streaming platform to connect kids with the world's best teachers

I work at a school with a campus in Texas and due to COVID-19, we created an interactive live streaming platform to connect kids with the world's best teachers in a fun and safe way. All of our live streams are free and open to the public. We were previously using a combination of Streamyard + Twitch, but had to make our own for various reasons. I'll see if our CTO will give a debrief of the tech stack on this thread. If you're a scientist, engineer, or artist interested in streaming on the platform let me know! michael@dexterlearning.com

sajaved 6y ago
congratulations for launching! looks great! I was also trying to do something like this with BugBlueButton but then found that to host it req higher configuration cloud machine and a lot of bandwidth so dropped the Idea I am tech stack and how you are managing to give away free of cost thanks
frequentnapper 6y ago
Hi, can you please do so? I am an engineer interested in starting my own streaming platform.
- bvergara87 6y ago
  If you want some technical details, shoot me an email: bryant@dexterlearning.com. Depends on what kind of streaming platform you're planning to build. If you want to have absolute control just make your own WebRTC solution. We have a bunch of other functionality so we just used Agora's API, it's been stellar thus far. Also....we're hiring ;)
rexreed 6y ago
Yes - very interested in what you're using for the tech stack. Why didn't Streamyard + Twitch work? What are your operating costs (if I can ask)? For the website, is this a custom site or based on something like Wordpress? Would love to know details!
- bvergara87 6y ago
  Custom site, built on Vue, Quasar and Firebase. Streamyard + Twitch did work but lacked a lot of functionality we wanted. We built out a lot of realtime functionality like polls. We used Streamyard worked for a little bit but because we wanted to give our streamers only one view to mess with we went with Agora's API.
  - rexreed 6y ago
    Cool. Are you still streaming to Twitch for the actual streaming? Are you hosting replays? If so, how are you doing that? Did you have to build custom software to do polls or was that something off the shelf? Another Q: if you're streaming to Twitch (or YouTube), how do you prevent anyone with the link just watching the stream? Basically how do you control the registered viewing experience? Sorry for all the Qs: you're being fantastic with responses!
    - MichaelAO 6y ago
      No, we're using Agora's API for streaming. Twitch's API works well however we want to try to keep as much in-house for the exact reason you mentioned above in controlling the viewer experience. We'll also be implementing their Cloud Recording functionality but that's WIP. Yes, we used Firebase to build real-time polls and ChartJS to display said data. Not a problem, if you want to continue the thread more long-form shoot me an email -> bryant(at)dexterlearning.com (had to post for Bryant... HN throttled his comments/responses)
- bvergara87 6y ago
  Op costs aren't crazy, a month of heavy usage cost us about $330 USD.
- MichaelAO 6y ago
  A big consideration was moderated chat. When we initially embedded a Twitch iframe on our LMS (streamed from Streamyard) - we had little control over who was participating. A cool side effect of it being on one platform is that our streamers can now invite students to join via video with a single click.
ArtWomb 6y ago
This is cool. EdTech is undergoing unprecedented digital transformation right now. Anecdotally I can say the more personal the video interaction, the more instructive. And meshing one-on-one live video with live pair programming will be the holy grail ;) On the coding side, I've had more success using P5JS than block-based and visual environments like Scratch. I think the great thing is that students can then advance on their own. Diving right into the API reference, The Nature of Code textbook and The Coding Train YouTube tutorials using state of the art AI techniques. For live interactive video I use Twilio and WebRTC. But will also be experimenting with Mux soon. Best of luck!
- MichaelAO 6y ago
  Agreed. It has been so interesting teaching via live stream (versus in the classroom). We've experimented with things like POV cameras and streaming in strange places (like a state park for an astronomy stream). Agreed with p5.js - we have a STEM Coding stream/course starting on Monday hosted by Dr. Chris Orban (https://u.osu.edu/stemcoding/ https://u.osu.edu/stemcoding/)
sandGorgon 6y ago
Are you using WebRTC for the streaming ? How has been the experience scaling it to a large number of users ?
- bvergara87 6y ago
  We're using Agora's API that's built on WebRTC, thus far we haven't had any issues with their service.

sajaved 6y ago

congratulations for launching! looks great! I was also trying to do something like this with BugBlueButton but then found that to host it req higher configuration cloud machine and a lot of bandwidth so dropped the Idea I am tech stack and how you are managing to give away free of cost thanks

frequentnapper 6y ago

Hi, can you please do so? I am an engineer interested in starting my own streaming platform.

bvergara87 6y ago
If you want some technical details, shoot me an email: bryant@dexterlearning.com. Depends on what kind of streaming platform you're planning to build. If you want to have absolute control just make your own WebRTC solution. We have a bunch of other functionality so we just used Agora's API, it's been stellar thus far. Also....we're hiring ;)

rexreed 6y ago

Yes - very interested in what you're using for the tech stack. Why didn't Streamyard + Twitch work? What are your operating costs (if I can ask)? For the website, is this a custom site or based on something like Wordpress? Would love to know details!

bvergara87 6y ago
Custom site, built on Vue, Quasar and Firebase. Streamyard + Twitch did work but lacked a lot of functionality we wanted. We built out a lot of realtime functionality like polls. We used Streamyard worked for a little bit but because we wanted to give our streamers only one view to mess with we went with Agora's API.
- rexreed 6y ago
  Cool. Are you still streaming to Twitch for the actual streaming? Are you hosting replays? If so, how are you doing that? Did you have to build custom software to do polls or was that something off the shelf? Another Q: if you're streaming to Twitch (or YouTube), how do you prevent anyone with the link just watching the stream? Basically how do you control the registered viewing experience? Sorry for all the Qs: you're being fantastic with responses!
  - MichaelAO 6y ago
    No, we're using Agora's API for streaming. Twitch's API works well however we want to try to keep as much in-house for the exact reason you mentioned above in controlling the viewer experience. We'll also be implementing their Cloud Recording functionality but that's WIP. Yes, we used Firebase to build real-time polls and ChartJS to display said data. Not a problem, if you want to continue the thread more long-form shoot me an email -> bryant(at)dexterlearning.com (had to post for Bryant... HN throttled his comments/responses)
bvergara87 6y ago
Op costs aren't crazy, a month of heavy usage cost us about $330 USD.
MichaelAO 6y ago
A big consideration was moderated chat. When we initially embedded a Twitch iframe on our LMS (streamed from Streamyard) - we had little control over who was participating. A cool side effect of it being on one platform is that our streamers can now invite students to join via video with a single click.

ArtWomb 6y ago

This is cool. EdTech is undergoing unprecedented digital transformation right now. Anecdotally I can say the more personal the video interaction, the more instructive. And meshing one-on-one live video with live pair programming will be the holy grail ;) On the coding side, I've had more success using P5JS than block-based and visual environments like Scratch. I think the great thing is that students can then advance on their own. Diving right into the API reference, The Nature of Code textbook and The Coding Train YouTube tutorials using state of the art AI techniques. For live interactive video I use Twilio and WebRTC. But will also be experimenting with Mux soon. Best of luck!

MichaelAO 6y ago
Agreed. It has been so interesting teaching via live stream (versus in the classroom). We've experimented with things like POV cameras and streaming in strange places (like a state park for an astronomy stream). Agreed with p5.js - we have a STEM Coding stream/course starting on Monday hosted by Dr. Chris Orban (https://u.osu.edu/stemcoding/ https://u.osu.edu/stemcoding/)

sandGorgon 6y ago

Are you using WebRTC for the streaming ? How has been the experience scaling it to a large number of users ?

bvergara87 6y ago
We're using Agora's API that's built on WebRTC, thus far we haven't had any issues with their service.