FURSTRE.AM

FURSTRE.AM was a live video-streaming site created by Jacktail in August, 2013.

2013

 * August - Jacktail created the site at the end of August for himself and his friends who did not like other streaming services that were available. Within a week, the site had ten streamers on it and was running off an old VPS using Adobe's Flash Media Server.
 * September - The site started getting many users, so Jacktail worked on a simple new interface using his basic knowledge of PHP and MySQL. He implemented basic security on streams and added stream page title, user icon, and stream description to the stream pages, as well as a list of all the streamers (at this point over thirty) and sorted by who was live.
 * October- Dreae joined the development of the site and created FURSTRE.AM v1. It had user membership, automated stream setup, stream directory, user customisable stream pages, upload option for background and icon art, and a better user interface.


 * Between October and December the site grew to over 150 live streaming users and had thousands of users access the site each week. The old server was replaced with a cheap Linux VPS that had a burst-able 1gbps connection.


 * December - With the growth of the site, Dreae started work on a new version of the site. This version would improve the UI, adding a menu to the left side of the site, allowing users to easily get to different parts of the site and their settings when logged in.


 * This update would also incorporate a new server side hosting and streaming using Nginx. These improvements made the site a lot faster and had more capabilities for future improvements for high usage streamers.

2014

 * January - The new version of the site was released with the new features plus a lot more that were added throughout the month. The site also hosted the second Uncle Kage WineStream after the use of LiveStream for his show back in December was troubled due to LiveStream's free user limitations, and users having a hard time viewing.


 * This brought many users to the site and the cheap VPS server started to struggle with the load. Thankfully, many users donated to the site during Uncle Kage's stream, raising money so that FURSTRE.AM could upgrade to a new dedicated 1gbps server.


 * February - This month saw the new server being deployed and a big increase of the site's performance. Users were no longer suffering random disconnections. The site was now gaining many users and had over 700 registered.


 * There was also an update to the chat site. This was a move away from IRC to a custom-built chat feature created by Dreae.


 * June - At the end of June, an update was made to the chat used on the site. It featured an updated UI, user icons, and was positioned on the right, giving it full height rather than being in the menu on the left where space was cramped.


 * Many users on the site did not like the change and took to the forum and their art profiles to complain. Some did not like the change of the interface, others did not like that it was moved to the other side.


 * It also created problems for people on smaller monitors, such as laptops, as the chat and menu overlapped the video. Through the weekend and the start of July, changes were made to fix most of the problems and also introduce three modes for the chat, so users could customise the way it interfaced with them.


 * July - At the start of the month, changes from the chat upgrades were still being done. Stream pages were updated to resize the video depending on how big the browser window was, and the left-side menu was made to be thin on stream pages.

2015

 * January - A Patreon was setup to help fund the site running costs. Users were able to help the project reach certain milestones to help improve the service. Most noticeably allowing the site to upgrade to a much better server as well as better server side software to help power the media streaming side of the site.


 * March - The site reached 10,000 registered users as well as the most concurrent amount of streamers at one time of 40.


 * July - A new developer stepped forward to help develop V3 of the site. This was to be a complete rewrite to allow adding new feature much faster such as group streaming, event pages and subscriptions.

2017

 * September - The furstrea.am domain expired. Jacktail had dropped support for the site nearly two years previously and left it with the other developers to take over. He speculated that none of them wanted it, hence the domain expiry.

Content and services
The site featured user accounts, automatic setup of streams, customisable stream and profile pages, chat, stream directory and a forum.

FURSTRE.AM had many developers supporting it, and included contributions made by non-staff members. Its API made it easy for developers to integrate parts of the site into their own, such as stream notifications to followers.