Scheduling
Create a session from any format in the catalogue: start time, a band target (Open through Marquee, or auto to match whoever queues), a fill policy and grace period, and whether to record. Open the queue early so people can line up; the home screen lists the show under Up next.
The casting board
A live view of the queue with each person's tier, band and the roles they are eligible for. Cast now runs the seeded random casting and shows you the log: pool sizes, picks, who went to standby. You can re-cast any role by hand, promote a standby, or let a lower tier take a talent role when nobody of the required tier is present. Seats filled by AI understudies are marked, with a one-tap recast with human when someone eligible joins later.
Directing
The director console shows the scene list and the cue list with the active cue highlighted. Next, Back and Jump move the show; the host has Next too, so you can run the floor from the booth or hand it to the talent. Timers and scores are editable live, the board editor lets you change a puzzle or question mid-show, module controls expose each mechanic's knobs, and you can mute or remove any participant. The monitor shows the stage exactly as the audience sees it, with per-participant audio meters.
Broadcasting
Add destinations: Twitch, YouTube, Kick, Facebook Gaming or any custom RTMP ingest. Press Go live and the server renders the stage headlessly and pushes one composited video to every destination at once; viewers in the app watch the same stage with lower latency straight from the media server. Stream keys are stored server-side and never sent to a client. Large audiences can be pointed at the external stream automatically.
Fill policies
| Policy | Behaviour | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Wait | Stay in casting for a grace window (default 10 minutes) with a countdown on stage; each eligible join is cast immediately; an AI warm-up host can run trivia. When the window ends, AI fills remaining seats if the format's minimum humans is met, otherwise the show is pushed back once, then cancelled. | Regular scheduled shows |
| Air | AI fills immediately; the show starts on time. | Rehearsals, demos, late-night slots |
| Strict | Never AI. Keep waiting; optionally cancel after a timeout and notify the queue. | Marquee shows, plays |
Under any policy you can press Air now or Cancel at any time, and allow a lower-tier human to take a talent seat before an AI would.
AI understudies, bring your own key
Understudy lines are generated by a language model and spoken by text-to-speech. All model calls go through TokenX, an open-source token manager, which means:
- Your key, your bill. Add a key for Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Cohere, OpenRouter and others, or an OpenAI-compatible local server, under Produce → AI. Keys are encrypted at rest and never returned by any screen or API.
- Budgets. Each AI cast member gets a per-role token budget and your account has a daily cap, so one chatty understudy cannot drain a key. Usage per show is shown on the casting board.
- Fallbacks. No key of your own? Shows use the platform key where one is configured. No key anywhere? A scripted fallback reads canned persona lines so the show never stalls.
Understudies are constrained to their own role, short outputs and the show's context, and they are always labelled AI for the audience and the cast.
Rehearsal
Run any format alone against the real engine, playing whichever roles you like while AI fills the rest. Good for learning a format's cues before you host it live.
Formats
A format is a data file: roles, a stage layout, scenes made of cues (lines, prompts, timers, choices, votes, scoreboard changes and game mechanics). The catalogue's formats are original scripts inspired by classic genres, plus public-domain plays. Format authoring tools and community formats are on the roadmap; today new formats are added by the ShowX team.
Getting access
Producer access is granted per account by the ShowX team while the platform is small. Ask us at hello@apphaus.us with what you would like to run and where you would broadcast it. Producers accept a short addition to the terms covering the platforms you stream to and the AI keys you bring.