A channel that is always somewhere else. Point a spare screen at it and you are looking at a live camera — sea otters in Monterey, bears at Brooks Falls, a harbour in Dublin, the aurora over Iceland — held for a few minutes, then on to the next. A small caption under the picture says what it is, where, and what time it is there.
Official live streams, published on purpose by their owners — an aquarium, a national park, a port authority, a university, an observatory — on the owner’s own YouTube channel and shown with YouTube’s embedded player. Nothing is scraped, no private or unsecured camera is used, and no frames or recordings are copied. Every camera and its owner is listed on the setup page, and the stills here are mock frames of the caption design, not live video.
The dial is curated: 38 cameras across four topics — animals, nature, places and sky. A small solar calculation skips a camera that is dark where it stands, and the aurora cameras are used only once the sky there is properly dark. A camera that has not started in 20 seconds is skipped and benched for six hours; there is no error screen.
A connection that can reach YouTube. Cameras always start muted, because browsers allow nothing else; with sound on, one tap unmutes. Hold time, topics, captions and a shuffle seed are in the URL. The project sets no cookies of its own, and YouTube’s player is subject to YouTube’s own terms and privacy policy.
Setup
A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.
F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.
Configuration
Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at elsewhere.livingkiosk.com/setup.
| Parameter | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
hold | 4 | Minutes each camera is held once it is playing (1–60). Clamped, not rejected. |
topics | all four | Comma-separated: animals, nature, places, sky. Unknown words are ignored. |
captions | on | off gives the picture the whole height. |
sound | 0 | 1 lets one tap or key press unmute the current camera and every one after it. Cameras always start muted. |
shuffle | — | Pins the running order, so screens with the same seed hop in step. |
dim | 0 | Darkens the picture and caption with a brightness filter, 0 to 0.8, rather than an overlay in front of the player. |
Elsewhere is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.