Citizen Journalism

Breakr.live

Every smartphone is a first camera to the scene. Live streams on a map, discovered by newsrooms in real time.

Breakr.live — live citizen journalism home screen

What it is

Newsrooms have spent a hundred years on the first-camera-to-the-scene problem — helicopters, freelancers, luck. Breakr.live makes every smartphone the helicopter. Anyone can broadcast to a shared geospatial map; newsrooms surface raw footage the moment it starts; viewers watch live or browse what was witnessed, by place and time. The record of an event belongs to the people who were standing in it.

How it runs

E
Edge API
Hono on Cloudflare Workers — D1, R2 archives, Durable Objects per stream
M
Mobile capture
Expo + RTMP on iOS and Android, with background location
D
Discovery map
Mapbox live geospatial view of every active stream

Key Capabilities

  • Broadcast live from any smartphone to a shared geospatial map
  • Newsrooms discover raw first-on-scene footage in real time
  • Viewers watch live streams or browse the archive by place and time
  • Background location keeps coverage continuous during an event
  • Per-stream state held at the edge — no cold starts, no origin server
  • Native iOS and Android capture apps alongside the web map

Live Infrastructure

Edge-native, zero cold starts

breakr.live, api.breakr.live, and ws.breakr.live are operational on Cloudflare's edge. One Turborepo holds the marketing site, the mobile capture apps, and the shared TypeScript types.

Discovery

Geospatial first

Streams are points on a map, not entries in a feed. Proximity to the event is the ranking function.

Status

Beta — domains live, apps in build

Learn More

Newsroom or broadcaster interested in early access? Get in touch.

Contact