About Switchpro

Years ago, When the reality of 'social distancing' set in, I had a lot of time on my hands like everyone else. Besides being a huge nerd I am also a musician and dancer so thought it was time to explore livestreaming, both as a performer and as an engineer. After researching and using some of the existing platforms and models out there, I found they were either too clunky or too...narrow. I started my engineering career in Flash 1000 years ago, and I have witnessed the seismic shift that HTML 5 has brought to livestreaming video and I was excited to see what could be done without flash in the 2020's. So, I buckled up and went after it.

Always one to avoid reinventing the wheel, I first sought out an open source streaming platfform that I could build off of and I looked at Jitsi, but I felt it has too heavy and it's written in Java, which is not my forte. What I really wanted was something built with Node, but there wasn't anything out there at the time. Thus Switchpro was born ^_^. Having also grown up in the Wordpress era, I wondered if there could be something like Wordpress for livestreaming, which is roughly what I aimed at starting with Switchpro. I think it's cool, I hope you do too.

Switchpro is an open source, web based broadcasting platform built on Node and the unopiniated Express framework. It is (and continues to be) built upon the following tenets:

• Speed

  Switchpro is built on Node and Express, and all of the default service dependencies can also horizontally scale well. (MongoDB, ProsodyIM,and ANT Media Server).

• Security

  Auth0 authentication backend, RBAC support, OMEMO end-to-end encryption support for chat through the Signal protocol, ConverseJS, and ProsodyIM, and JWT secured API are already implemented and security will always be a priority for the project.

• Immediacy

  There is a saying that goes something like, 'All that is real is the moment.' It's hard to capture the moment when you have to download anything. Time is the most valuable thing we have. Switchpro is all about mimimizing the time commitment neccessary to begin broadcasting.

• Accessibility

  I believe in the Web. I'm dating myself here but, when I was in high school we were lucky to have 7 or so Apple's with 9600 BAUD modems! I grew up with the Web and I remember a time when the world was full of optimism for a free and open information age as originally envisioned. Lots has happened since then that has muddied the waters a bit, but I still believe in the Web. I'm excited to see web standards reach the point today when something like Switchpro can exist with zero client side dependencies besides a modern web browser. The path to freedom lies through the Web, it always has.

• Transparency

  The landscape of livestreaming is fraught with censorship, bias, and barriers to entry for founders, developers, and creators, It is my view that only a truly open source streaming platform has any chance of solving the *very* hard problem of maintaining freedom of expression whilst moderating content in an ethical way. Thus Switchpro is OSS released under the aGPLv3, to encourage and foster a community of founders and developers and by extension any number of creators that maintain the same principles of Community, Positivity, and Freedom of Expression.