8 points harisingh1612 1 hour ago 5 comments

harisingh1612 1 hour ago | parent

hey 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.

Todd 6 minutes ago | parent

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.

Vakaiser 17 minutes ago | parent

https://liveworld.info/cam/seattle-sea-otter

Started watching the Sea Otters in the Seattle Aquarium. 10/10 would 'awww' again.

senordevnyc 12 minutes ago | parent

defrost 3 minutes ago | parent

Every is a bold claim. Aspirational. Good luck going forward filling them all in.

There's a fair few missing from Australia (easily more than 8 24/7 live cameras in Oz). eg: The Kings Canyon Waterholes in Watarrka National Park. (mostly dawn and dusk action)