The current community television experiment running on PeerTube
PeerTube is extremely cool and is a great YouTube alternative but it does a lot that we don’t need and because of this running it takes more time and resources than are necessary for this project.
So I was thinking about creating a new system (perhaps build on JSFS) focused primarily on supporting community television stations and somehow it occurred to me that maybe I could simply use Preposterous instead.
A Preposterous server automatically produces RSS feeds for each blog. In addition to being useful to RSS readers, this turns each blog into a podcast if you attach an audio file to your posts. The same is true for video (probably, I haven’t tested this), creating a video podcast or in other words: a channel.
The server also aggregates these RSS feeds at the site level, combining posts from all the blogs into a single chronological feed.
So to turn this into a community TV station, all that is needed is a dedicated Preposterous server where producers submit shows via email and a suitable client that can consume the global feed and display the videos.
I just so happen to have another project that might fit the bill…
If enough shows are produced on a regular basis, this creates a continuous broadcast. If the broadcast “consumes” all of the currently published shows, the client could choose to air “re-runs” by selecting previous entries in the feed and re-airing them.
The beauty of this is that unlike any other option I’ve considered this setup is capable of producing both a “live” broadcast stream as well as on-demand viewing with no more infrastructure requirements than a static website. Shows can be published using any device that supports email and can be viewed using any web browser, RSS reader or for the ultimate viewing experience, UHF+.
Perhaps best of all this requires little more of me than spinning-up a dedicated Preposterous server (and maybe tuning-up the code a bit) and eventually finishing UHF+. The ongoing maintenance of such a service is virtually zero and the operational cost should be within double-digits for the foreseeable future (it’s a small community).