LIVE layer · live channels
/monitorWhat it answers
Rolling news channels pinned to their studio cities: one click opens the broadcast in a floating window, over the map.
When to open it
- When a story breaks and the written wire is ten minutes behind the studio: the broadcast tells you what is happening before the headline lands.
- Through a central-bank decision or a press conference: Bloomberg Television running while you keep the map and the PM panel in view.
- To read one event through two opposed broadcasts — CGTN and Sky News side by side — without leaving Monitor.
- When a ZONE heats up and you want regional coverage rather than the global wire.
Anatomy
Switch on LIVE in the layer grid at top right: sixteen studios appear as red dots ringed in white, on the city they broadcast from. Two studios too close together at the current zoom merge into a single dot carrying a count; zooming in splits them apart.
Clicking a dot opens a player window at bottom left: a header — red dot, channel name, city and country, close cross — then the broadcast. Windows stack, three at most, drag by the header and resize from the bottom-right corner.
One window is already there when Monitor opens: Bloomberg Television, muted. Browsers don't allow sound without a gesture from you; bring it back from the player's own controls.
The registry covers sixteen international English-language channels: Al Jazeera English, ABC News, BBC News, Bloomberg Television, CGTN, CNA (Channel NewsAsia), CNBC, CNN, DW News, euronews, France 24 English, NHK World-Japan, Reuters, Sky News, TRT World, WION.
How to read it
On the map
| On screen | How to read it |
|---|---|
| red dot | One studio. On hover: the channel name, then LIVE · city, country. |
| Red dot with a number | Several studios collapsed at this zoom. The number is how many; the hover lists them. |
| Live channels · N menu | Opened by clicking a clustered dot: one row per channel, with its country. Picking a row opens that player. |
Inside the player window
| On screen | How to read it |
|---|---|
| Header: red dot, name, city and country | The window's title bar. It is also the drag handle. |
| × | Closes the window and stops its broadcast. |
| This broadcaster does not allow embedding. Watch the live stream on YouTube. | The channel refuses to be embedded — the case for BBC News. Open on YouTube opens its live stream in a tab. |
| This broadcaster is off air right now. Check its channel on YouTube. | No broadcast running as of the last check. |
| Live status unavailable. Open the channel on YouTube. | Status undetermined. Don't read it as "off air": the question was never settled. |
| This stream is unavailable. | The stream can't be played. |
Controls
| Gesture | Effect |
|---|---|
| LIVE toggle in the grid at top right | Shows or hides the dots on the map. Leaves open windows alone. |
| Click a dot | Opens that channel's player (and recenters the camera if Fly is on). |
| Click a clustered dot | Opens the Live channels · N menu. Esc or a click outside dismisses it. |
| Drag the header | Moves the window; it stays inside the frame. |
| Drag the bottom-right corner | Resizes it, 16:9 kept. |
| × | Closes the window. It is the only gesture that closes it. |
| Player controls | Sound, quality, fullscreen: inside the window, on YouTube's own controls. |
Cross-check with other Hawkline features
Keep in mind
- Three windows, not four. Past that, clicking a dot does nothing — close one first. Nothing tells you so.
- On-air status is frozen at page load. A channel that came on air since then only shows live after you reload Monitor.
- The red dot doesn't tell you who is broadcasting. The hover reads LIVE for every studio in the registry; you find out whether the broadcast is running by opening the window.
- Turning LIVE off doesn't stop the sound. The toggle only governs the dots; an open window keeps playing. Only the cross closes it.
- Clicking empty map doesn't close players. It closes info cards and the channel menu, never a window — deliberately: you don't lose your broadcast by clicking the map.
- A curated, English-language registry of sixteen. It is not a directory of the world's newsrooms, and the streams run through YouTube: an outage on their side, or a blocker on yours, and the window stays black.