The story
Sc. 01 · the brief
Nobody can watch fifty hours a day.
A lot of Bulgarian pop culture now happens on TikTok lives (an estimated 45 to 50 hours of them a day) and no newsroom can watch that much. The brief was an outlet for the gossip before it becomes news. The format was settled before the first commit: no full lives, only single moments of one to four minutes, plus Shorts.
Sc. 02 · what we built
A recorder, a moment finder and an ear.
A recorder watches a roster of creators around the clock and starts the moment a live does. A scorer reads each live in ten-second buckets on 13 signals (comments, laughs, gifts, joins, audio) and cuts the peaks into eleven editorial series. Echo, our own Bulgarian speech model distilled from Whisper, hears what was said.
Sc. 03 · how we built it
Recording is automatic; publishing never is.
The recorder runs on a free Oracle Cloud ARM server and stream-copies to MPEG-TS, because MPEG-TS survives crashes. Chat signals are shifted 10 to 20 seconds earlier to cover chat lag. Templates are HTML pages captured frame by frame in headless Chrome, so the same job renders byte-identical twice. Every post waits for a human's approval on Telegram.
Sc. 04 · the detail
An empty slot beats a mistake.
The editorial rules are written down, and each maps to the code check that enforces it. Facts another outlet published first are retold in our own words, credited and linked; a story needs two independent outlets, or it says there is only one. No AI images or voices of real people, at all. A post may only go out between 18:00 and 21:00, and never on a Monday.
Sc. 05 · where it stands
The site is up; the machine was rebuilt.
Research and format on 15 September; the first commit and the first pages went up on the 19th. Two days later the app was retired and the machine rebuilt from scratch, with no code carried over. The site collects nothing, and a fuller version, with a creators section and an eight-article handbook, is written and waiting.