We don’t hear about the livestreams that don’t go well so much. However, technology breaks down and breaks down quite often. This can happen to an artist playing a Twitch show for 50 people, but also to Glastonbury and Driift working on one of the biggest livestream events of the year.
Glastonbury’s Live at Worthy Farm event included lots of great artists and a special appearance by The Smile, the new band including Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. Lots of people, who had bought tickets, couldn’t make it into the livestream. The problem was that lots of the unique ticket codes were flagged as invalid. After almost two hours the solution was to remove the paywall to the event. And since the event was live-to-tape instead of actually live, viewers were also able to rewind for example.
Even livestreaming events that received universal praise suffered their share of issues for individual viewers.
And while individual cases can be just that, an individual’s connection that is problematic, lag created by some error on a laptop or phone, etc. the technological problems are always below the surface.
It’s just too busy
The most common trope surrounding the failure of livestreaming is to do with traffic. Servers need to handle a lot of people entering a virtual door and getting their ticket verified. Two major examples come with Justin Bieber‘s New Year’s Eve livestream and Marc Anthony‘s ‘Una Noche’ livestream from 17 April. The former’s livestream overloaded because 1.2 million T-Mobile users showed up having mostly bought their tickets on the last day. The company hosting the livestream, VenewLive isn’t new to big number of visitors having been set up by a combination of HYBE, Universal, and Kiswe. But just like you have to wait at an arena sometimes, so servers can overload due to high demand. Similarly, with Una Noche, demand seemed to outstretch capacity. In a great article in Billboard, there are two stories: 1) again, lots of people bought tickets at the last moment causing server undercapacity; 2) too many people used the same codes causing the system to crash. Either way, it has led the livestream platform Maestro to change its policy and only host shows that run through their own ticketing platform.
The fix
There’s an easy answer to this problem: a cap on tickets sold. StageIt‘s Stephen White told me that they actively encourage artists and bands to put a maximum amount of tickets per show. This allows for good preparation in terms of what kind of server capacity will allow shows to run smoothly. Of course, it also creates a sense of scarcity. And, indeed, StageIt sees a more even tickets-sold ratio across the period that those tickets are on sale and less last-minute buying then reported for Bieber and Anthony.
Another option is to scale your server capacity, which means you probably have to work with one of the major cloud services such as AWS or Google Cloud. These companies have vast options available to scale server capacity. AWS has an auto-scaling functionality, while Google Cloud allows for automatic load balancing to allow for heavy, unexpected, traffic. The problem here, of course, is that this doesn’t come cheap. The more power and capacity you use, the more you pay. Whether the ticket prices will still cover this is something you want to know in advance and not be faced with last minute or even the day after.
A third option is to use an existing platform that knows how to deal with audiences at scale. Dedicated music livestreaming platforms like VenewLive, StageIt and Maestro – and their are dozens more – are great in terms of offering specific functionalities, such as integrated merch sales, and closed, ticketed, environments. Platforms like YouTube and Twitch already have so much traffic moving through them that any spike from even the largest livestreams won’t impact the overall computational capacity too significantly. They also have other advantages such as different direct payment options, suc as tipping and channel subscriptions. Of course, this is different than buying a ticket, but for artists who aren’t at the level of Marc Anthony or Billie Eilish it might make sense to drive users not to a ticket but to another method of payment. Going back to StageIt, they find that most artists get the highest return not with a set ticket price but with a pay-what-you-can model.
We won’t shake off these issues
I’m a strong believer that livestreaming is here to stay, especially if done well. By that, I mean that the experience of a livestream should be different from that of a gig in a venue. Instead of just pointing cameras at a stage, livestreams should offer viewers a unique experience that feels like it’s made just for them instead of for hundreds of people at once. To achieve this, it makes a lot of sense to use a different platform than YouTube or Twitch, to partner with a provider that makes it their business to create something bespoke. Take to Twitch for a quick and dirty livestream of you or your band in the studio, but make sure to create something with added value if you ask people to pay for a ticket.
The livestream-specific platforms may be more limited in terms of capacity and potentially have other technical limitations. However, these issues will remain as long as livestream. Best thing to do then, is to try and stay in control – as evidenced by Maestro’s reaction to the failed Marc Anthony livestream – and to prepare well. The latter probably means you want to cap your crowd so you know exactly how much server capacity you require. And, finally, let’s make sure we talk about the failures and learn from them. Not all news about livestreams has to be rosy, it’s also okay to tell the world something went wrong.