Permalinks for live streams

[Alan Noble]

For our live streams to be readily discoverable and searchable, their URLs must be permanent, i.e., “permalinks”.

There are (at least) two ways we might achieve this:

Method 1: URL redirection

For each live stream, we create a link that redirects to the YouTube live stream, e.g., vidgrind.appspot.com/live/cuttlecam, and the underlying redirection is updated programmatically every time a new stream is created.

Method 2: Persistent streams

Each YouTube live stream persists indefinitely (hence the URL is permanent), even when there is no live content, i.e., the stream is paused at nighttime or for maintenance.

[Saxon Milton]

What if we used datastore variables to store redirect URLs for streams that we can update programmatically after a broadcast request to youtube. For example, on setup of a broadcast using vidgrind.appspot.com/broadcast, we save/update a variable with name “Redirect.<broadcast name>” (e.g. “Redirect.CuttleCum”) with value of the youtube live URL that we can get from the YouTube API. We can add a handler for “vidgrind.appspot.com/live/” that will match the last part to a variable i.e. we take the last part of the URL and get any matching variables, and then redirect to the housed youtube live URL. For example, for “vidgrind.appspot.com/live/cuttlecam” the handler would try to get the variable with name “Redirect.cuttlecam” and then if found, redirect to the URL stored in the variables Value field.

[Saxon Milton]

On second thought, it’s probably not a good idea to have a URL that can be hit without authentication that performs datastore ops.

[Saxon Milton]

Resolved by PR #139