https://www.biffyclyro.com/revolutions-live.htm

When the pre-order campaign for Biffy Clyro’s new live CD/DVD reached a point of maximum excitement and anticipation we hosted an innovative online screening of the show.

A 24 minute highlights package of the DVD was made available for us to broadcast once-off.

I approached Ste Thompson from Powster with the idea of driving twitter traffic around the broadcast with a specific hashtag. After bouncing ideas around, he suggested that we run an ‘online concert’, where fans can join the virtual crowd by tweeting #biffylive.

While Powster worked on the twitter crowd mechanic I set things up for the live streaming element.
I created a custom Brightcove player with a hidden playlist looping a trailer until I needed to push the live stream out.

I’d learnt a thing or two from the Hugh Laurie stream we did and decided that a count-down to the start of the show would be the best way to build anticipation and make sure all the fans knew that the show wasn’t delayed. I asked Andy Saiker and Mike Downs to create a 5 minute count-down to play before the show started. The timer really helped to get the fans excited and the tweets started flowing as soon as the count-down began.

Matt Cummins helped set the Wirecast machine up with a reliable connection and, once again, we spent the duration of the live stream in the basement surrounded by cables and servers.

The twitter integration was a huge success, the fans loved seeing each other in the crowd and got so involved that #biffylive started trending on Twitter.