alt Hacker Newshey HN, hari here. built this over the last 2 weeks solo. figured id share now since HN weekend crowd is a good stress test.
the idea came from wanting a way to drop into somewhere on earth and see whats happening right now. youtube has thousands of 24/7 live streams (nature, transit, airport aprons, urban corners) but theyre scattered across a million channels so nobody finds them. so i put them on a globe.
currently 641 cams across ~60 countries. tap a marker, video plays inline, per-camera chat so you can see who else is watching the same view. free, no login needed to watch, no ads, no tracking.
stack: laravel + reverb websockets + postgres, maplibre globe with osm tiles, runs on a $10 tokyo vps. discovery is youtube data api cron on 200+ keywords + admin divisions, plus scraping the internal youtube search bypass for keyword combos api search misses. currently at 6% of the free youtube api quota.
thin spots in coverage: africa, small towns anywhere, central asia, pacific islands. if you know good 24/7 cams that arent geo-blocked, either drop the url here or use the submit button on the bottom left of the site. i approve within a day.
open to feedback on the map ux, discovery, whatever. happy to answer stack questions too.
Replies
Firefox' Enhanced Tracking Protection breaks the map in a weird way. The Map bounces up and down erratically.
This message piles up in the console:
Blocked https://liveworld.info from extracting canvas data because no user input was detected
This is nice, but how are you determining the location of a camera for map purposes? Some of them are correct, but there are others that have very specific map locations that are off by as much as a hemisphere - an Ohio one in Chicago, a Venice, Italy one in San Bernardino, Pennsylvania and Ohio in Phoenix, etc.
Love the idea Hari. On my iPhone, when I tap a dot, it takes me straight to the camera page. I would expect a popover with a title, etc. and a second tap to go to the camera page.