Milky Way Fiasco
For three years we made a live show every Friday night: the video, audio, design, a new poster each week, and the broadcast server and website behind it. The whole run now lives in a searchable public archive the show controls.
The show and the archive
Film production, weekly live broadcast, and archive · 2020–2023
Milkyway Fiasco Series
Three years of original film, audio, and graphic design — produced as a new long-form show and streamed live every Friday night.
The brief
Every Friday needed a complete show — made, broadcast live, and kept — without disappearing into a rented streaming platform.
The tension
Every show had to be creatively complete, delivered reliably to a live audience, and preserved as part of a growing body of work.
What we decided
Own the complete path from show creation to audience and archive: originate every show’s video, audio, and graphic design, then provision the broadcast server and public website.
What we built
- An extensive archive of long-form Friday-night broadcasts produced across three years
- Video and audio production, graphic design, editing, color, sound, and post-production
- A Linux VPS configured to ingest OBS over RTMP
- FFmpeg processing, Nginx distribution, and a Next.js public stream
- A PostgreSQL and Prisma archive with video, audio, playlists, and analytics
The result
Three years of original Friday-night broadcasts, now a searchable public archive of video, audio, and playlists.
The extensive public archive now brings together the full run of Friday-night broadcasts, with searchable shows, video, audio, and track-by-track playlists.
Ownership
The shows reached the public through an independently operated broadcast server and website, then became an owned archive rather than disappearing into a third-party streaming platform.
How it runs
Creative production, the Friday broadcast, VPS, media pipeline, public site, and permanent archive were run as one continuous operation.
Technical specification
Architecture, systems, data, and how it is hosted and run.
- 01
Creative production
Each long-form show brought together original video and audio production, graphic design, editing, color work, sound design, and post-production across a range of creative software, including Final Cut Pro.
- 02
Live broadcast pipeline
OBS transmitted the finished live program over RTMP to a purpose-configured Linux VPS. Nginx RTMP received the broadcast on port 1935, with FFmpeg and HLS forming the web-delivery pipeline for the public site.
- 03
Audience and archive application
A custom Next.js application presented the live experience and now powers the searchable on-demand archive, with individual show pages, video and audio source switching, timestamp handling, playlists, and social metadata.
- 04
Data, storage, and operation
PostgreSQL and Prisma model shows, artwork, video, MP3s, dates, playlists, and first-party traffic analytics. AWS SDK S3 tooling, DigitalOcean Spaces/CDN delivery, and Nginx media proxying keep the extensive archive independently controlled.
- 05
Current deployment
The archive runs as a Next.js 16 process on the Linux VPS behind Nginx and TLS. It is not currently deployed in Docker.
The weekly posters
Weekly promotional posters for social
Broadcast posters
SI was commissioned to create the weekly promotional creative for Milky Way Fiasco, a live-streaming show with an ongoing online archive.
Each week, SI developed a new poster for the upcoming broadcast, creating a distinctive visual identity for that episode and promotional asset for distribution across social media.
The brief was to make the show visible, recognizable and shareable before it went live.
Services
website - milkywayfiasco.com
Project details
Services
Currently accepting select projects
Let’s make it.
Making something every week? We design it, build the pipeline that carries it to an audience, and keep the archive yours.
We build and deploy what you need so you can create and ship what you want. Then we make the ads and place them.