The road to making MSP Waves what it is today has been a great adventure and a wonderful learning experience. This post is going to outline some of our achievements so far, and our vision for where we're going. What started as a place to give minnows a voice has become so much more, and we're only getting started...
If you're not interested in reading about the inner-workings and software that makes MSP Waves run, skip to the Vision for the Future of MSP Waves section
Development
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
When MSP Waves first began, it used already available open-source tools (nginx and OBS) to get started. Without this publicly available code, MSP Waves may have not become a thing. These tools are still essential in our day-to-day operations, but since then we have found that our unique objectives required more automation and development to fully realize our potential.
First we added a couple more open-source tools to our arsenal: Icecast for an audio stream and Musicbot to play that stream in Discord. Discord proved to be a very popular way of listening to shows, and also the most troublesome part to keep running. Musicbot was far too unstable for our needs, so thanks to @wehmoen's suggestion, we went with the oddly named Sinusbot which has proven to be much more stable and hands off for our 24/7 audio stream. Speaking of 24/7 audio stream, we also rely on another open-source tool to deliver SteeMix (new name coming soon), which is a separate station that MSP Waves syndicates between live shows, and is entirely powered by AzuraCast, which has been amazingly feature rich, simple to deploy, and easy to manage.
Schedule Management Interface
Using these available tools got us pretty far, but our need for more quickly became apparent. The first custom app is a scheduling app built by @lanmower in nodejs, and it is the backbone of our infrastructure. Everything we do revolves around this weekly schedule, and creating something that's easy to manage while also being able to serve other apps was a must. This app isn't something the public ever sees, but it contains all the data that runs everything else we rely on, and I can't stress enough how important it is to our organization.
Discord Subscription Bot
Now that we had the schedule app, we could start working on other apps to help automate things for the staff and the audience. The next app we had made was our Discord Subscription bot, also written in nodejs, designed to allow listeners to subscribe/unsubscribe and get show info right in Discord. @anarcist69 did an amazing job on this, and it is possibly one of the best yet least utilized apps we have for our audience. Go into PAL and type >shows to give it a whirl!
Website
Next on the agenda was a website. This has been the most costly part so far, but it was a much needed upgrade from our 90's style wordpress abomination. @ura-soul did a fantastic job bringing mspwaves.com into the 21st century with a sleek interface, an intuitive schedule, mobile support, and room to grow into the future. The site now allows for tipping your favorite artists or show host with HIVE/HBD or STEEM/SBD, seamless playback of the audio stream while navigating, show times presented in your current local time, ad integration (more on that later), and so much more. Be sure to check it out if you haven't already and let us know what you think.
More apps to come
We're not done with development, far from it. We still need some more tools for automation. I'll try not to get too technical here on this post, but if you think you can help with any of these, contact @r0nd0n on Discord.
More Discord Apps
The next thing we'll need is another Discord bot that manages show host roles and several webhooks depending on time and ffprobe output. This should be a relatively simple task, but if it's possible it would be best if it could be integrated with our nodejs Subscription bot, and bonus points if it can play an mp3 stream in Discord to combine all our bots into one.
OBS Scripting
After that, we'll be needing an app that reads our schedule.json, detects streams via ffprobe, and uses OBS Websockets to change scenes on OBS at the appropriate times.
Headless OBS
This is the most ambitious thing we have planned, and may never get the proper funding to realize it, but as it is now, MSP Waves requires a dedicated computer/server with attached GPU to stream with OBS 24/7. This is either very costly ($200+ a month) if professionally hosted, or comes with problems if done from a home connection. If we ever find the funds and the right dev, we'd like to have ffmpeg, gstreamer, and other tools do what OBS does, but on a headless server managed by a web interface to make costs low. This is quite ambitious, but is technically possible, and would be a great gift to the open source world if it could be created.
This list isn't exhaustive, as there are small things that need made or configurations that need to be streamlined, but it's enough for this post. Now, on to what we're planning on doing with all of this...
Vision for the Future of MSP Waves
Tired of the nerd talk? Well this is where things get interesting. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What does the future hold?
I'm hesitating calling this a "roadmap", as it's not really that. We will be releasing a proper roadmap, perhaps with an HDF proposal, but this is more for a general understanding of how things will work and getting our hosts and audience on the same page with regards to where we're going.
MSP Waves is going to be Open Source
Yes, all the tools we're creating will be released for public use under the MIT license. This means anyone will be able to do what we do for their own community, and contribute to the code if they wish. We're hoping to provide a model and the tools others can use to create their own station, and all code and even process documentation will be theirs to pick and choose what parts they want.
You may ask, why release everything as open-source?
The answer is simple; we're building a platform. A media empire. Something that hasn't been done, but it analogous to what cable/satellite TV is now. MSP Waves will be but one channel among many, broadening the audience's choices, and thus widening our potential audience.
If HIVE, or even crytpo in general, are a success, and people want to promote their dapps or services, we'll be poised as the premiere place to get the right audience for advertising.
MSP Waves as a Service
Many who want to use these set of tools to have their own station may not want to, or have the skills to, run all this software and keep it running 24/7. We will be offering a turnkey solution for those who want to do this, with built-in monetization features to allow it to pay for itself depending on the audience they draw. There will still be the option for self-hosting with or without the ad service we offer, but we suspect many will choose this path if other similar open-source implementations are any indication. The possibilities are contingent on how much development work is done, but we're imagining a plethora of options for everyone to only pay for what they want for their own community.
The Future Looks Bright
Eventually we'll see a selection of similar stations (like channels on cable TV), running the same software, many hosted by our infrastructure, with targeted advertisement delivered to their audience.
People will be able to start their own "channel" and get paid doing it by filling their airtime with show hosts and attracting an audience. This is the ultimate goal behind our efforts, and if we succeed, we'll be at the forefront of empowering innumerable communities to give others a voice and entertainment.
That's it for now, and while there is much more we could add, you'll just have to stay tuned to @msp-waves for more announcements. We are very excited about our future on HIVE, and our part in forging this new path in a world fueled by crypto.
What do you think of this vision? How do you see yourself participating in it? Would you like to start your own station? Would you like to advertise to a crypto savvy audience? Would you like your own show? Comment below and tell us your thoughts.