ArcLight: Live Video, Built Like a Slide Deck

There’s a popular piece of software called OBS. It lets you stream or record your camera, screen, and graphics as video. It’s incredibly powerful, but it’s very poorly designed. I’ve always wanted something focused on the story you’re trying to tell.

Think about the last time you presented on Zoom. You probably shared your screen and immediately disappeared. Your face became a postage stamp in the corner, or vanished altogether. The audience got a slide and a voice. That’s not a show. It’s a failure of software to support the storyteller.

The fix today is to go learn scene software like OBS, which thinks in sources, scenes, and filters. Meanwhile your actual story lives in Keynote or PowerPoint, which think in slides. So you end up running two apps, alt-tabbing between them, and hoping you don’t click the wrong thing while people watch.

I’ve been doing this juggling act since I started making YouTube videos during the Covid years. I made it work, but it wasn’t great. Building software to solve it seemed impossible. Tools like OBS were built over years by teams of open source developers. AI coding tools have gotten really impressive, but I never would have imagined I could build this in a few weekends.

So I built it. It’s called ArcLight, and it’s a Mac app that turns slides into live video.

Build it like a deck, then press play

Here’s the whole idea in one sentence: every scene is a slide.

You put cameras, screens, and titles on a slide the same way you’d drop an image into Keynote. Snapping guides, builds on click, transitions. The controls you already know. Then you press play, and the output is your show, live.

Built for the Mac, private by design

ArcLight is native Swift on Metal. No browser engine, no cloud. It’s built AI first with support for MCP and Claude Code and Codex.

Try it

The ArcLight Preview is free for 30 days with every feature on. After that it’s $49 a year, and the launch price is locked in. It needs macOS 14 or later.

I’d love to hear what you build with it. Come tell me on r/arclightlive, or just send me a note.

Your show is one keystroke away.