---
id: friend-group-tv-channel-playout/01-summary
title: 'Friend group TV channel playout: 1. Summary'
report: https://ai.hiina.space/reports/friend-group-tv-channel-playout.md
section: 1
version: 1
updated: '2026-10-27'
author: Hiina
---

Index of everything on this site: https://ai.hiina.space/index.md

# Friend group TV channel playout: 1. Summary

- Section 1 of 8 of the report "Friend group TV channel playout" by Hiina (v1, updated 2026-10-27)
- Report overview and contents: https://ai.hiina.space/reports/friend-group-tv-channel-playout.md
- Next: https://ai.hiina.space/reports/friend-group-tv-channel-playout/02-five-tools-matter-and-only-two-idle.md

## 1. Summary

The best fit in October 2026 is **ErsatzTV Next running standalone, fed by a small custom scheduler and queue service**. Next is a Rust streaming engine. It takes a JSON playout, serves each channel as HLS that a browser can play, starts a channel only when someone requests its playlist, and stops it after **90 seconds without a client**. Its `dynamic` playout item asks an external HTTP endpoint "what plays now?" at playback time, which is the only documented request-queue hook among the video tools. For a no-code option, use **Tunarr with on-demand mode**. It pauses the channel's position when nobody watches, but it has no request queue. For a setup that would rather stay on an existing MediaMTX pipeline, a **`runOnDemand` wrapper script over a pre-normalized library** gets you most of the way with roughly 70 seconds of wasted remuxing after the last viewer leaves. The cheapest option of all serves a computed live m3u8 from pre-segmented files, so nothing runs at view time. No project ships a finished "community TV with request queue and auto-fill". The glue in every option is the same small piece: a queue store, a Discord or web front end, and a resolver that picks the next clip. For audio only, **AzuraCast 0.24.0** (released 25 Oct 2026) now has request-queue playlists and does the whole job out of the box.

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Text licensed CC BY 4.0 (attribution: Hiina, ai.hiina.space). Source: https://github.com/hiinaspace/ai-hiina-space