NAB
Live streaming gigs
rose to the foreground during lockdown and are now big business with companies
like Live Nation promoting live streamed experiences for music fans who
couldn’t, or choose not to, attend the concert.
article here
Performers like
electronic musician deadmau5 have been doing this for well over a decade,
helping to pioneer the experience. In doing so, the Canadian DJ, whose name is
Joel Zimmerman, has taught himself a lot about streaming technology from
hardware switchers to the latest codecs but nothing in his view has come close
to replacing performing live in front of a crowd.
“I wasn’t thinking
there’s going to be the total shift of my career from now on… that I’m just
going to be a streaming act,” he said, keynoting the Content Delivery
Summit for Streaming Media.
“There’s much to be
said about being in a venue with an actual human. That’s some level of
interaction and communication. [That said] streaming just lends itself so
easily to [not] requiring big travel demands or set ups.”
For years, deadmau5
used Twitch or Mixer to stream live but during the pandemic he launched
mau5trap, a proprietary streaming service. He also joined video streaming
platform StreamVoodoo as an equity partner.
“All musicians and
artists need a solution like this today and for the future,” deadmau5
explained in a 2020 press release. “I was working on bringing my shows online
and starting my own streaming platform to connect with my community. Not just
for me, but for all musicians in the world.
“After the pandemic
began, we needed a solution for video quality with excellent sound, beyond
anything that has been done before. We tested every other provider offering and
I didn’t find what I was looking for. StreamVoodoo is phenomenal for live
concerts and streaming sessions at scale with no latency.”
To the StreamingMedia audience,
he claimed there was a lack of a video-centric streaming platform: “Zoom was
not built with video in mind,” he said.
A primary issue is
latency. “If [the stream] is struggling to keep up within two milliseconds and
it’s having a hard time doing that, then that just breaks it.”
He remains
concerned about achieving the same live alchemic interaction between the
musician and audiences in a stadia in an online environment.
“You go see the Foo
Fighters and see no show is the same. Maybe the setlist stays the same, but
there’s always some story, there’s always some back and forth between Dave
[Grohl] and the crowd and all the other guys. So that’s like something that
that is there in the moment, for those people that are right there.”
He implies that if
the streaming experience isn’t right then viewers are “just a fly on the wall…
you’re not inclusive into that experience,” he said.
“A ticket holder
[who has] invested in you, in that moment in time, to have exclusivity of that
moment and being in the audience and being in the crowd,” is a missing element
in some live streams.
Hosting live
concerts in the metaverse with real-time rendering is a potential answer. He
explains, “I don’t foresee the future being a camera’s perspective of something
because then you’ve just locked it to whatever they give you. I’m at a concert
and then I want to walk around that front row. So we’re going to need some kind
of volumetric representation of that so that I can go and do that.”
He tells StreamingMedia that
he gets his inspiration for live streaming from live streamers on Twitch such
as TheSushiDragon. “This kid, you got to look him up. He’s got this warehouse
in Montana and just every new gadget, every new little handheld toy, every kind
of IP camera or follow camera robot.
“He’s just built this huge playpen and he does live editing, live streaming, and uses all peripheral technology to do these great live edits.
“So I’m finding all
these characters, you know using all this different tech. You just got to kind
of find what works for you.”
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