This year was the first year I was able to test out a new A/V and streaming setup. As a programmer, I’m smarter than the av-er-age bear when it comes to the potentials of various offerings and API’s within the tech world. I found out that the GoPro Hero 7 Black started the first offering of ‘livestreaming’, and you can specify any RTMP server as a custom destination. So I bought one, spooled up a pair of Amazon EC2 instances, and ordered NGINX to act as a RTMP server on each of them.

My GoPro streams directly up to the first EC2 instance over a internet hotspot.

I have a middleman graphically-intensive VM (on PaperSpace) that I remote into, to run OBS and put some overlays on the first fed-in RTMP stream. It then just broadcasts said resulting stream out to the second EC2 instance/RTMP server.

The second EC2 instance has been configured with all the right keys and settings to echo an inputted-in feed out to YouTube, Facebook Live, and Twitch all simultaneously.

The end result? I can live-stream track days, complete with an overlay of Twitch Chat, to YouTube, FB, and Twitch.

My technology stack can be easily expanded on – I could have data from the inside the car (g-forces, accelleration, torque, etc etc etc, via a Raspberry Pi or Arduino) fed to one of my VM’s in real-time, parsed into some cool graphic using a homebrewed program, then overlayed on my OBS stream and resultingly echoed along, for instance.

I’m overall pretty proud of this stack; no one else has accomplished real-time livestreaming of track days on a budget. The closest I’m aware of is SCCA Majors or related high-level events with professional AV crews and high bandwidth.

To be honest, if I could figure out how to sell it as a service and make some money on the side…