📡 Live Streaming
A broadcast station for culture, built in-house.
Matsuri Live is not an embedded third-party player — it is in-house streaming infrastructure, built on LiveKit and self-hosted on Hetzner. Owning the pipes means owning the economics and the rules: what a stream can sell, how viewers can tip, and how archives are gated are all platform decisions, not a vendor's.
One stream, four surfaces
A Matsuri stream is never free-floating. Every stream attaches to exactly one surface — an event, a shop, a crowdfunding campaign, or a podcast — so going live always means something is happening in the economy.
A tea master streams the workshop she lists on Experiences. A seller demos a one-of-one piece from their Shop and drops it mid-stream. A crowdfunding creator pitches backers face to face. A J-Times podcast goes on air with a live audience instead of a downloads counter.
The interactive layer
Watching is the floor, not the ceiling. Around the video runs a full interaction stack:
Real-time chat over WebSockets, with viewer counts and per-message moderation hooks.
Streamers put questions to the room and viewers vote live — audience input as part of the show.
Claimable in-stream coupons — a reason to be watching live rather than catching the archive.
Pushable in-stream cards: a product, a crowdfunding reward, an event ticket, a coupon, a poll, a CTA, or a tip target — shown as presets, on schedule, or always-on.
A stream you follow stays pinned as a Live Activity on the iPhone lock screen — broadcast presence beyond the app.
Viewers report messages and block users; statuses run scheduled → live → paused → ended, with a super-admin emergency force-end.
Live drops are the commerce heart of the system: the same escrow-backed products, campaign rewards, and QR-ticketed events from the rest of the platform, surfaced at the exact moment the audience cares most.
💸 Tipping in five rails
Gratitude should never fail on payment method. Matsuri Live accepts tips in five rails — JPY (Stripe), MTC, SOL, USDC, and MLC — with a minimum of ¥100 and an optional anonymous flag.
- Rails
- JPY (Stripe) · MTC · SOL · USDC · MLC
- Minimum
- ¥100 per tip
- Anonymity
- Optional — tip loudly or quietly
- Integrity
- Idempotency keys on every tip; all revenue lands in an auditable ledger
There is no separate "gift" gimmick layer — tipping, aimed at the streamer or at an on-screen tip-target drop, is the gifting mechanic. MTC tips make streaming one more real earning-and-spending loop behind the token — see Tokenomics.
Archives — five access modes
A stream's second life is its archive, and creators choose exactly how open that life is:
- Free
- Open to everyone, forever
- Paywall
- One-off purchase unlocks the recording
- Limited window
- Watchable only for a set period
- Tier-gated
- Reserved for a membership tier on the shared Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum ladder
- Private
- Creator-only — unlisted by design
Tier-gated archives are one of the concrete perks of the platform-wide membership ladder — the same four-tier gate that governs premium drops and members-only chat. The full disambiguation of every ladder in the ecosystem lives in Levels & Tiers.
🪙 MLC — the prepaid coin that refuses to be a token
Live platforms run on small, impulsive purchases, and Japanese law has a specific, well-worn instrument for that: the prepaid payment instrument (前払式支払手段) under the Payment Services Act (資金決済法). MLC — Matsuri Live Coin — is built as exactly that, on purpose.
- What it is
- A prepaid in-app coin for the live economy — tips, drops, purchases
- Top-up
- Stripe packages in six bonus tiers, from starter to whale
- Legal design
- 資金決済法-compliant prepaid instrument: non-refundable, 180-day expiry
- Ledger
- Immutable transaction ledger with FIFO expiry of spend lots
- Creator side
- Creators request MLC → JPY payouts from earned balances
- Firewall
- MLC and MTC never auto-swap — deliberately
MLC and MTC are separated by design: an automatic MLC-to-MTC bridge would make MLC exchangeable for a crypto asset, dragging it into crypto-asset exchange licensing (暗号資産交換業) territory. Matsuri chose the honest architecture instead — MLC is compliant prepaid value for the live economy, MTC is the utility token of the wider ecosystem, and the wall between them is load-bearing. Regulatory clarity is not a constraint we tolerate; it is a moat we built.
The practical result: a viewer in Tokyo tops up MLC with a card in seconds and showers a streamer mid-performance, while a crypto-native viewer tips the same stream in SOL or USDC — and every yen and lamport of it lands in the same auditable revenue ledger.
Safety as infrastructure
A broadcast station is only as good as its worst stream. Moderation is wired into the data model, not bolted on: message reporting, user blocking, structured stream lifecycles, and a super-admin force-end for emergencies. Combined with the rule that every stream attaches to a real, accountable surface — a KYC-verified shop, an approved campaign, a published event, a newsroom podcast — anonymous drive-by broadcasting simply has nowhere to stand.
Live is where the whole ecosystem happens in real time: experiences get an audience beyond the room, shops get a stage, campaigns get a face, and media gets a heartbeat. And because the infrastructure is in-house, all of it compounds inside the Matsuri economy instead of leaking out through someone else's platform.