Building a pirate radio station with WebRTC (or why it's impossible)

[brianloveswords]

So over the next few months one of my projects is to build a pirate radio station using WebRTC. A bunch of us at the Mozilla Foundation are ex-college/public radio DJs and we've been talking about doing some sort of pirate radio station for years now, and I think the technology is at least somewhat ready to make that happen in the browser.

I plan on documenting as much of the process as possible: the successes, the hardships, what's easy, what's hard. The “(or why it's impossible)” part is for if I fail to do it – that way I can leave my trail of broken dreams as a cautionary tale for others not to follow (or for those stalwart enough, to pick up and reassemble).

[mikeal]

I can only accept this talk if you play at least one clip from the film "Pump up the Volume."

Also, your intro music must be "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen.

[brianloveswords]

DEAL

[mikeal]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuuCezrAUKk

[dominictarr]

/cc @feross

[gsf]

Could this also take into account running a WebRTC station alongside LPFM? There should be a lot of them popping up around the country soon. http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/low-power-fm-broadcast-radio-stations-lpfm

[feross]

@brianloveswords Sounds like an awesome project! Lmk if you ever want to chat about challenges and potential ways to solve them. I'm working on WebTorrent (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent) right now and trying to make it as peer-to-peer as possible by eliminating most of the signaling server apparatus and making peers do that work (i.e. peers introduce peers to each other). We should compare notes when you/I are further along!

[yannickmodahgouez]

Hey Brian, I twitted you earlier but this exactly what we are doing here at http://unltd.fm, we don't exactly call it "pirate radio" but that's the spirit : live broadcasting straight from the browser. I would really love to read the slides from your talk. Cheers.