Live broadcast on the platform is two surfaces: Stream, the broadcast console where a show is built and run, and /live, the public directory where a broadcast can be found and watched.
01Building the show
Stream captures directly from the browser. Cameras and microphones come in through the standard device APIs, and screens, windows or tabs come in through screen capture. Device labels and available inputs are exactly what the browser reports — nothing is invented to fill an empty list, and a device that is revoked mid-show tears down honestly instead of leaving a dead source painted as live.
A scene is a saved recipe rather than a saved stream: it stores a name and which video source to use, so opening it later re-acquires a live feed instead of replaying a stale one. Scenes persist to your account, and an empty scene list means you genuinely have no scenes saved — a network or permissions failure surfaces as an error with a retry, never as a silent empty state.
Audio runs through a real mixing graph. Each source passes through its own gain and pan stage into a master bus, with an analyser tap on every channel and on the master. The level meters move because they are reading actual audio; muting a channel drops its gain to zero and the meter falls on its own, the way a physical desk behaves.
02Going live
Stream sends the program bus to viewers over a direct peer-to-peer connection, one connection per viewer. The console reports a broadcast as live only after the transport is genuinely up and the first metered heartbeat has succeeded, and the viewer count shown is the real number of connections currently in a connected state, not an estimate.
Two limits are worth knowing before you plan around this. The transport uses STUN only — there is no relay server — so some restrictive networks legitimately cannot be reached, and that surfaces to the viewer as a failed connection rather than a spinner. And because each viewer is a separate connection from the broadcaster, this suits small and mid-sized audiences rather than mass distribution.
03Watching
The /live directory is publicly readable and renders for signed-out visitors, so a broadcast can be linked and found. Watching requires signing in. A broadcast appears only while it is genuinely live and its heartbeat is current, which means a show that ends — or a browser that closes without stopping cleanly — drops off the directory within seconds instead of lingering as a dead card.
Broadcast titles are built from a display name or a neutral creator handle, never from an email address, and a host without a display name is shown what they will look like publicly before the first broadcast goes out.
04Recording
The record button captures the program bus to a WebM file with the mixed audio, follows scene cuts mid-recording, and on stop uploads the result to storage and registers it in your Library. If the upload fails the recorded file is kept in place and the upload can be retried, so a finished recording is never lost silently.