lbostral

Why Streaming Radar MCP. Streaming and media intelligence specialist: not a generic MCP, not an RSS feed wrapper. Every datapoint sourced, dated, confidence-scored.

Author here. I've been encoding video for about 25 years, and FFmpeg has been part of most of that. Started at M6 Web in France, 4 servers in a basement producing HLS before hardware encoders had it.

I wrote the full story behind this: https://www.streaming-radar.com/p/i-built-a-wordle-for-ffmpe...

It's partly about the game, partly an homage to people like Fabio Sonnati (who documented FFmpeg for 15 years on a WordPress blog), Jan Ozer (whose book is literally called "Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video", and I built a game that turns encoding back into guesswork), and Fabrice Bellard who started it all.

I emailed FFmpeg to ask permission. No response yet. Which tracks, they barely have time to patch bugs found by Google's AI.

CLI in Rust: https://github.com/ludobos/ffmpuzzle-cli

I also wrote about the invisible French engineers behind streaming (Bellard, VLC, GPAC): https://www.streaming-radar.com/p/les-streamers-de-lombre-30...

I also wrote a piece on the invisible French engineers behind streaming (Bellard, VLC, GPAC): https://www.streaming-radar.com/p/les-streamers-de-lombre-30...

I've been writing a weekly streaming industry newsletter for 68 editions. Most of my time wasn't writing — it was information logistics: tracking sources, searching my own archive, remembering which expert I'd cited and when. Bookmarking tools keep dying (RIP Pocket). If you write a newsletter, your sources are your most valuable asset and they live in tools you don't control. I built an MCP server to own that layer — sources, notes, briefs, article tracking. SQLite-backed, your data stays yours.

The design principle: the MCP handles everything around the writing (collecting, organizing, retrieving). It never generates content.

Caveat: I daily-drive a more advanced version (Supabase, custom schema, 50 tools) to build two paid industry reports (20K+ datapoints, 172 companies, 34 countries). inkwell-mcp is the extracted portable core. It type-checks, but I haven't battle-tested it with anyone else's workflow yet. Issues welcome. 25 years in streaming, built M6 Replay (50M+ users), several CTO roles. Full write-up: Full write-up: https://streamingradar.substack.com/p/my-newsletter-has-50-a... The newsletter: https://www.streaming-radar.com The full MCP with 20K+ datapoints (bidirectional, 4 slots): https://lens.streaming-radar.com/mcp Happy to answer questions about the architecture or MCP design decisions.

english version http://www.okayafrica.com/culture-2/afrostream-ending-tonje-...

Don't hesitate to give us feedbacks

We will do that :)

We tested on prerecorded vidéo now. We are working on live. Keep in mind it's a early alpha version

I think that Foxpass answers all your needs https://www.foxpass.com/learn/

The problem here is that movies with black people (as we said in France, we need to call a cat a cat, we need to define clearly the skin here), had to be seen everywhere, not only in France, because that's why the movies need to be : to watch by the most. And that's what we are doing, making exposure to underserved movies. And we are doing even in some underserved countries

We don't need to deal with racism, we want to tackle it.

Yeah I love Will Smith too, even in Hancock :)

Let's face it : Will Smith played in a lot of top movies in this decade. Could you name another one ? :)

In France we have a Will Smith example too, His name is Omar Sy (saw in the last Jurassic World).

For one Will Smith, you have here in USA Tyler Perry, Kevin Hart, Chris Tucker, Chris Rock, Spike Lee (sorry for all the women I forgot here). These guys are awesome too. We want them everywhere in the world.

Absolutlely true, it takes time to have good relation with producers, and that's why we have worked for one full year to establish these relations.

;)

We are working with some people all over the world for subtitling and dubbing.

We will not dub massively, we prefer people discover contents in their original format, with subtitles in their languages. we will dub in certain cases, though, with the good people.

That is not, for sure, a territory we have yet explored, (becasue there is a LOT of contents to explore in other countries first, and we have more a West Africa background), but yes we will look for Egyptian movies in the future.

Exactly there is a lot of culture from Africa, and not a unique African Culture. or subcultures. I don't know what subculture is :)

That's the point of Afrostream, to have a great place to celebrate African Diaspora descendants and all of these different points of view.

Yes we are !

We knew better the sub-saharan countries for instance, so our network and focus is to go there first. We have a lot of work to have the best catalog from there first, and then we could extend.

To have a black James Bond, we need to have a better representation of what is black.

Blaxploitation (yet I would love to have this movie in Afrostream) was positive in a sens that it gives positive heroes who are black and it's very important to me that Black people think they could be what they want to be.

By the way, I dreamed to be Shaft when I was younger.

But let's face it, We don't have a lot of movies like that anymore, or they are not internationally distributed.

That's the question we want to solve with Afrostream.

And, again, African Culture does not exist.

You give me an idea with iranian movies ;)

you don't understand my point here : We do not do a service for specific people, we do a service with specific contents.

I will try with another argument : Tyler Perry is one the most prominent performer of the USA. He did movies, series, theater. All successful. He is maybe the most complete artist in the USA. These productions were distributed in the USA. You can't find these production in France by example, but either in a lot of countries. Why ?

Afrostream's goal here is to distribute Tyler Perry and other talents all over the world. As I said, I don't know if this is positive dsicrimination, but Afrostream is my political statement to this 'Why'

Drama Fever is the Netflix for Asian Contents primarly, 80% of the users are non Asian.

We are convinced it's possible to other segments, and that's why we will open the door for all of you on Afrostream

We know very well Jason, the founder of Irokotv, we had some discussions with him just a few days ago.

Irokotv is very centered on movies from Nollywood, and has started to have some movies from Hollywood.

We have another point of view : We are not the Netflix of a specific region, or the Netflix for certain people. We are the Netflix of the African Diaspora powered contents. We want to show what Afro descendants are capable of, and we want to solve the distribution problem of theses movies all over the world.

Irokotv was here first, and yes we will have Nigerian contents. But we have other goals. We want to distribute, create and show to the world how some contents you couldn't see are incredible. We want to show that we could have our black Superman, or our black James Bond. We want to expose all of the richness of all the African cultures (in USA, Brazil, France, UK, Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Angola, Nigeria and more), all over the world

We will have movies from Mali, Cameroon, Angola, some from France. I could not yet talk about our catalog completely, Netflix is watching me ;)

That's exactly our point :)

I would keep this answer and use it every day, thank you :)

You are right. And just in case, the full name of Tonjé is Tonjé Bakang Tonje, so he doesn't mean to have a CAP problem (And I know his computer is aging not well :) but I think it was just to be clear with his full name.

Call him Tonjé (pronounce Tonjay), though, he will always answer you with a smile :)

Great advice I will keep in mind all the time, thank you :)

English version will come next year and yes we will have movies from Nollywood :)

I love Morgan Freeman by the way. A man who played a president of the USA, and God multiple times, is exactly what you need to show everywhere, not only on Afrostream

Is it positive discrimination ? Since there is a political implication there, I don't think so, but I will try to answer.

Do you know the movie "Ride Along" ? It did more than 100M$ in the American market for a budget of 25M$. This movie has one of the best start of any movie all time in January.

Do you know how we could see this movie outside USA. Not in a movie theater in France, though. Piracy is the first channel to see african-american movies in Europe and Africa.

Some movies are not well distributed and it appears so that a lot of these movies are from or with an African descent castings. That's not fair. We will correct this fact. And if you want to call this positive discrimination, why not.

Afrostream is a service which will permit to show movies which are not shown in a lot of countries in a legal way. That's our political statement.

Hey since i use a lot pinterest too, and I am a man too, and French, here is my favourite board : https://fr.pinterest.com/ludobos/t-as-pas-du-sel-/

We don't intend to be "Netflix for blacks" or "Netflix for African people only" too, that's a bizarre idea to me, in fact. We have some quality movies in our catalog, and we hope to make it discover to all of you people :)

Thank you for your great feedback,

Seems Netflix is a big concern for a lot of people here. Since I am a subscriber to Netflix too, I think my first action is to unsubscribe soon to help us. Just kidding.

Netflix has some flaws too. And we intend to exploit them :) , let the fight begin

Great feedback :) languages and dialects are a part of our strategy.

We have other ways to protect yourself from Netflix, though, but we can't reveal all our moves at once :)

As i said, I hate the world Niche, and I never use it only to say I hated this word,

African descent movies are so diverse. We have an African Diaspora all over the world which produce a ton of contents you never saw, you don't even know their existence and thant's our goal to diversify the point of view of a maximum of people. Yes Netflix has resources, a lot of resources but we know our market well. They need to catch up, that's my word for now, fight is on