Ionosphere turns conference recordings into a browsable, searchable, interconnected archive. Every talk is transcribed with word-level timestamps, enriched with extracted concepts and topics, and linked to the social conversation that happened around it on Bluesky.

Built as an entry for the Streamplace VOD JAM.

What's here#

Talks & Transcripts — 95+ talks with synchronized video playback and word-level transcripts. Click any word to jump to that moment. Leave comments and reactions anchored to specific passages.

Concordance Index — A multi-column concordance of every significant term across all talks, with cross-references and timecode links. Scroll horizontally through the index and click any entry to watch the relevant moment.

Community — A curated overview of what people said about the conference on Bluesky: top posts, blog recaps with OG previews, conference photos, YouTube talk uploads, 20+ VOD JAM sites, and 80+ projects featured at the conference. Built by pulling ~2,000 posts from the Bluesky search API, extracting links and images, matching posts to talks by speaker mentions and timestamps.

Mentions — On each talk page, a sidebar shows Bluesky posts that mentioned the speaker during their talk, time-aligned with the transcript. Thread replies expand inline. Click a mention to seek the video to that moment.

Speakers & Concepts — Browse talks by speaker or by extracted concept. The NLP pipeline identifies named entities, topics, and relationships across talks, linking them into a navigable web.

Architecture#

Ionosphere is built on AT Protocol. Talks, speakers, transcripts, and concepts are published as AT Protocol records on a PDS, making the entire archive addressable and interoperable with the atmosphere ecosystem.

Appview — A Hono server that indexes records from Jetstream, serves XRPC endpoints, and manages a SQLite database. Enrichment pipelines handle transcription (Whisper), sentence/paragraph segmentation, named entity recognition, concept extraction, and speaker diarization.
Frontend — A Next.js app with synchronized video playback (HLS.js), scroll-synced transcript rendering, OAuth-based commenting, and multi-column layouts using greedy column-fill algorithms.
Data — Conference schedule ingested from the ATmosphereConf calendar, VOD recordings from Streamplace, transcripts aligned to talk boundaries using diarization-based chunking.

Development#

# Start local PDS + Jetstream
cd apps/ionosphere-appview
docker compose up -d

# Start appview
PORT=3001 npx tsx src/appview.ts

# Start frontend (use 127.0.0.1 for OAuth)
cd apps/ionosphere
NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL=http://localhost:3001 npx next dev

Deployment#

Deployed on Fly.io with persistent SQLite storage.

flyctl deploy --config fly.appview.toml --remote-only
flyctl deploy --config fly.web.toml --remote-only
curl -X POST https://api.ionosphere.tv/xrpc/tv.ionosphere.invalidate

Author#

Built by Blaine Cook.

License#

MIT

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