Watching Makkah and Madinah Live: How the Broadcasts Actually Work
The Haramain broadcasts are produced by Saudi state television and carried by many sites. What is official, what is a mirror, why streams drop, and what to do when one does.
Where the picture comes from
The continuous broadcast from Al-Masjid al-Haram is produced by Saudi state television and distributed on the Quran channel. The equivalent broadcast from Al-Masjid an-Nabawi in Madinah is carried on the Sunnah channel.
Everything else — including this site — is carrying that same signal. There is no separate camera. A site that implies it operates its own feed from inside the Haram is not telling you the truth.
Why we say that plainly
AlHaram.live embeds the official streams and adds things around them: prayer times for both cities, a language switch, and guides. The value we add is the surround, not the picture, and it seemed better to say so than to let the wording imply otherwise.
Why a stream stops
Interruptions are normal and usually have ordinary causes:
- The source channel restarted the broadcast, which gives it a new address. Reloading the page is generally enough.
- Regional blocking or a network that filters video. This affects some corporate and hotel networks in particular.
- Bandwidth. Automatic quality reduction happens before a stream drops entirely; if the picture is soft, that is what is happening.
If one stream fails
Our live pages carry more than one source, so switching to a backup is usually faster than waiting. The Makkah and Madinah pages are separate, and a fault on one does not imply a fault on the other.
A note on what watching is
A broadcast is not a substitute for being there, and we would not present it as one. For many people it is a connection to a place they cannot reach this year, and that is reason enough for it to exist.
Official sources
Everything above is based on the following sources. Where they and we disagree, they are right.
Spotted an error? Tell us — we correct the guide and date the correction.