I have been watching an awesome, if somewhat chaotic, webcast of Amanda Palmer’s Dublin gig. Obviously it isn’t as good as sitting in the audience with Neil, but the girl rocks and the tech was pretty darn impressive. Jason Webley and the rest of the EvelynEvelyn crew are stuck in the US because of the volcano, so Amanda had a big screen up on stage with Jason on videophone via Skype. Playing together was hard because there’s a 2 second time delay between Dublin and New York, but they managed a creditable show all the same.
And the whole thing was webcast live on UStream. The video quality wasn’t great, but it was far better than anything I’ve seen from conventions. The feed went down when Amanda started playing the new Volcano Song, which is all about how she and Neil look like missing out on a vacation together due to the current travel chaos. That could easily have been NeilWebFail. But otherwise it was an impressive show.
Neil dear – if you happen to be reading this, I’d love to talk to Amanda’s tech guy about the resources necessary for all that.
Also I want the lyrics for the Volcano Song. I am totally filking it, and replacing the volcano with the #@$%*&^#! CBP.
I was at the Glasgow gig and have just watched the Dublin webcast, and from what I can tell, the vast majority of the tech required was begged, borrowed and stolen in the couple of hours before the gig. Certainly the Glasgow gig only seemed to involve two MacBooks. The tech guy was Sven the drafted-in tour manager, with Amanda, and some help from the audience.
It’s amazing what tech can do, isn’t it? It’s almost like we live in the future…
Oh, the basic tech requirements are quite simple. It is the bandwidth you need to sustain a quality connection that’s the killer. You could probably source a UStream webcast with an iPhone 3GS over the mobile phone network, but the quality would be shit.
I’ll try getting through to Sven tomorrow. Hopefully he’s celebrating right now.