Case study · Public media & music

Streaming live music for public radio.

We designed and built NPR Live Sessions — formerly VuHaus — a national platform that brings live performances and on-demand music video from a network of public-radio member stations to a single audience.

Video streaming Platform engineering API & web app
50KMonthly active users
16KPerformance videos
35+Member stations
1,700+Hours of content
NPR
The context

A shared home for public-radio music discovery.

Public-radio stations have long championed emerging artists through in-studio and live performances. The platform — launched as VuHaus and later adopted by NPR Music as Live Sessions — set out to gather that work from stations across the country into one place where audiences could discover new music, watch live, and explore an ever-growing performance archive.

01 · The challenge

Many stations, many formats, one audience.

Bringing a distributed network of member stations onto a shared platform meant handling everything from scheduled livestreams to licensed video archives — without asking each station to change how it worked.

  • 01Ingesting and transcoding video contributed by many independent stations.
  • 02Delivering reliable live broadcasts alongside a deep on-demand catalog.
  • 03Honoring per-video licensing windows and rights across the network.
02 · The build

An API-first platform for video at scale.

We built a Ruby on Rails API paired with a dedicated web front end, backed by a cloud video pipeline that let stations contribute performances and audiences stream them anywhere.

01

Video pipeline

Automated ingest and transcoding turned raw station uploads into adaptive, ready-to-stream video.

02

Live streaming

HLS delivery powered scheduled live broadcasts and performances viewable across devices.

03

Discovery & curation

Artists, genres, playlists, and editorial features made a large catalog easy to explore.

03 · The product

Watch live, then explore the archive.

The experience brought station-produced performances together into one place to watch, browse by artist, and follow curated collections.

NPR Live Sessions playback experience with performance video and listening queue
01Live and on-demand performances presented in one continuous viewing experience.
NPR Live Sessions artist page for Kacey Musgraves
02Artist profiles bring biography, station media, and related performances into a focused discovery path.
04 · The result

A national stage for live public-media music.

  • 01A single destination uniting live performances from stations across the country.
  • 02A scalable video pipeline handling ingest, transcoding, and adaptive streaming.
  • 03Rights-aware playback that respected per-video licensing across contributors.
  • 04A foundation trusted enough to carry the platform into NPR Music as Live Sessions.
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