Your community should not find out you were streaming afterwards. OnAir watches your channels and tells them the moment you go live.

Three ways to stream

• Twitch — live status, the current title, and the viewer count.
• YouTube — live status and title.
• Your own server — point it at a MediaMTX instance on your VPS or dedicated box. No platform account, no third party, and nobody else's advertising in front of your members.

Add as many channels as you like, in any mix. They can belong to you, to your staff, or to members you want to feature.

Announced where people will see it

Going live can post a topic in a forum you choose, with the player embedded in it, so the conversation happens on your site rather than somewhere else. Followers are notified the way they already expect to be.

A page, and a block

A page listing whatever is on air right now with the stream playing inline, and the channels that are not. Plus a sidebar block for anywhere on your site.

The block shows nothing at all when nobody is streaming, rather than sitting there permanently announcing that nobody is streaming.

Works with Live Topics, if you have it

If you also run Live Topics, going on air can open one automatically so people have somewhere to talk while they watch, and close it when the stream ends.

Built to be left alone

• A platform having a bad minute is treated as unknown, never as offline — so a blip cannot end a broadcast that is still running and announce it all over again.
• YouTube is checked less often than the others on purpose. Its API charges heavily for the question, and polling it like the rest would exhaust a day's allowance before lunch and then report everything as offline.
• Nothing OnAir does can hold up a page load, even on a community with no cron job set up.

What you need

For Twitch, a free developer application. For YouTube, an API key. For your own server, a MediaMTX install and its address — the setup guide covers it. Use one, two, or all three.