The state of going live from a browser

Publishing a live stream directly from a browser feels like it must be one of those solved problems. Watching live video in a browser is so common these days it's hard to imagine a time when it required proprietary plugins to even have a chance of working. Even video communication feels trivial now thanks to modern browser features like WebRTC. The "trivial" part is only really true if you're using two browser windows on the same machine, but still, it's you on video! Twice!

So as a web developer looking at all this video successfully being sent and played back by the browser, it's totally reasonable to think that publishing a live broadcast directly from a browser would be easy. All the building blocks are here, there's surely an npm package that ties it all together for publishing to sources like Mux, Facebook, YouTube Live, Twitch, etc...

Unfortunately that's simply not the case. There's no reasonable way to publish a live broadcast directly from a browser. It's possible to capture the video and eventually get it there, but you're almost always going to need to get a server involved.

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