#ds106 Revival

If you follow me on Twitter you may have recently noticed the use of more OG hashtags like #ds106radio and #ds106tv. It appears in light of everyone quarantined at home, many of us are finding that community to be a welcome escape for some creativity and collaboration. I've jumped on the radio several times already for short sets and even while I was on vacation in Jamaica I knew I needed to register https://ds106.tv again for this revival.

I didn't really have much of a plan for the video side of things, but we have been experimenting with streaming video in Reclaim Video for awhile now and so I knew we could spin up an Ant Media Server which would provide an RTMP streaming endpoint pretty easily. There's lots of different software that supports that configuration and while it's not as simple as YouTube or Twitch, the benefit of us streaming to our own server is that we can bypass all the copyright restrictions that so often stifle anything interesting (yes, even on live streams YouTube scans audio in the background in realtime and will cut you off even if you have the radio on in the background while talking).

I had my first chance at a larger experiment this past week by streaming a live online karaoke session to DS106 TV for OER20 as a substitute for what would have been their social for the first night of the conference. They of course cancelled the in-person event but moved much of it online (a monumental task for which they should be commended) and Martin Hawksey asked Jim and I if we could figure out how to do Karaoke, or rather KaraOERke as we called it. The details of how we set it up are at https://bit.ly/karaoerke which I setup as a guide and distributed to folks before we began. We used Zoom for meeting together for those that wanted to sing and I piped the audio from YouTube in the room and used OBS to stream it all back to the web for those who just wanted to watch the event. We had 19 people in the room and another 36 watching online simultaneously and we all had an absolute blast with it.

So the next step I think is to make sure folks know how to stream. I wrote a guide today that covers the settings, software, and includes a tutorial with a piece of software fairly new to me called Streamlabs OBS which is a fork of OBS (which I had been using) with a nicer interface. You can find the guide at https://ds106.tv/howto/ and I've already heard some rumors of different ideas for shows including Second Life, A Chopped cooking challenge, and even live chess matches. I'm looking forward to playing more with this in the coming weeks. Video won't kill this radio star, but if we're going to own both the vertical and the horizontal no better time than now.