Two-Way Streaming Creates a Live Vibe for Crowdless Concerts

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Jonathan Healey: Our bread and butter is what they call the jam scene. So it's music rooted in the grateful dead and jam rock. And that culture for decades has been live streaming concerts. The term that we use is called "Couch Tour." Rather than going on tour with the band, you sit at home on the couch and you've just watched the entire tour. One thing that we noticed was that people couldn't go out to see live shows, and there's a level of connectivity, when you go to a concert hall, you get to interface with other human beings and share stories and talk about the music. So we decided to turn the camera around on Couch Tour and show people at home, and it's been great. So we've been doing that a bunch of different ways.

We use zoom as the main product of that. It becomes a two-screen experience. So you are watching the stream on your primary device--whether that's a television or a computer--and then you're using a secondary device, whether it's a phone or a tablet or another computer that is using Zoom. So, back to the latency point, it's been kind of interesting just because people are working with the latency issue and the nice thing about music is it's very forgiving. You have verses, you have choruses. So things repeat. As a director, you're able to stage things in that environment. So if someone is singing the chorus and it already happened, you can show it again and cheat it live, and we can do that a lot. So then it has a really live feel to it. So we've been creating these online communities through different types of shows--usually broken down by themes for music genres--where these different tribes of people will come every week to watch a concert and then have a kind of nightclub experience.

So they're hanging out in the Zoom, and we mute our Zooms to stop the cacophony of sound that would happen if everybody's mics were on. They're using Chat to communicate with each other. They're watching the live stream on their primary device, and they're dancing and they're having a good time. So we have then taken that up another notch in projecting it into our venues. In the Brooklyn Bowl venues, it's one part music venue, one part bowling, one part restaurant, and all of the bowling lanes have projection screens at the end. And so what we've been doing in our crowdless environments so that the artists have people to interact with is we're projecting the Zooms onto those screens. Or, in the case of the Capitol Theater, onto the theater walls. So that the artist may be in a crowdless environment, however, they're seeing the people at home, and they can kind of communicate to them. They can vibe off of that. And then the people at home are also being integrated into the stream, whether that's a camera op actually physically shooting the screens or full-fade dissolves of streaming zoom to an input and a switcher or an input Livestream Studio, and then bringing those people in whether it's full-frame dissolve, or picture-in-picture. So it's been a really good communal experience to kind of bring that vibe back to music fans who can't really get it right now.