At the beginning of this year, singer/songwriter Niall Horan had to take the decision to cancel his Nice To Meet Ya world tour. But earlier this month, he announced a special, one-off live streamed show from London’s Royal Albert Hall and promoted by livestreaming company, Driift. Audio equipment for the show, which achieved a massive 150,000 ticket sales, is supplied by Wigwam Acoustics with Ant Carr, Niall’s long-term head of touring and production, at the helm and regular crew members Matthew Kettle and Joe Campbell handling broadcast and monitor positions respectively, both deploying DiGiCo SD5s.
 

The 2020 final of Simon Cowell’s hugely popular TV show Britain’s Got Talent wowed millions of viewers with a spectacular LED screen stage set and virtual audience, powered by Green Hippo’s Hippotizer Boreal+ and Karst+ Media Servers.
 

Those 30-minutes opening show, gorgeous stage, novel AR production effects, and multi-camera special shooting has brought us an unusual TV experience of LOL S10 World Championship final which just concluded. Now it’s time to explore the differences from the perspective of broadcasting technology.

In April last year Porto-based rental company, LVT Audio, purchased a large Martin Audio MLA Compact and Mini array—the latest endorsement of the British manufacturer.

AudioVideo BrandBuilder Corp (AVBB), the manufacturer’s rep and master distributor for Dream Chip in North and South America, provided cameras to 3g Wireless and RF Film, Inc. that took viewers on an up close and personal tour of David Blaine’s recent stunt: a balloon ride that had him floating nearly five miles above earth. The event, titled “ASCENSION” set a new record as the most-watched YouTube Originals live event to date with over 770,000 global viewers watching simultaneously.
 

MTR Design’s tune-up body kit underlines the stylish Q8 factory design with subtle changes. Made of ABS plastic, it gives the front apron a large spoiler while the rear bumper is elegantly emphasised with a diffuser-look attachment. A carbon spoiler lip for the tailgate can also have – on request – matching tailpipes for the rear recesses. Vehicle photography is a crowded and highly competitive market even for an expert like Denis, and the trick is for your images to stand out from the gazillions of others – professional and otherwise – that swamp the internet, especially on social media platforms like Instagram, where users voraciously and constantly consume a daily diet of vibrant visual art.

Livestream performance producers VYE have collaborated with Clair Global and production company GENETIC Productions to create a unique pay-per-view live stream performance space at Clair Global’s facility in Nashville that has redefined the live stream experience. “We wanted to give fans everything they’re used to seeing at a concert with moving lights, video walls, etc. and blend that with high-quality video streaming and a multi-camera setup for broadcast,” states Danny Zacharias of VYE, who designed lighting for the live stream space using gear from Elation Professional and sister company ADJ. “Add to that a Virtual Live Audience and this is really a virtual live event experience like no other.”

A small subscription fee covers an amount of free content and the pay-per-view price varies for other material. It is a completely new concept for South Africa and the brainchild of Christiaan Ballot from technical supplier Blond Productions and production manager Pieter-Jan Kapp (Kappie) from PJK Project Management. The two would usually be working together extensively during the arts festival season which has effectively been canned this year like almost every other ‘live’ event as the country fights the pandemic.

British American Tobacco launched glo, a Tobacco Heating Product (THP) utilizing new tobacco heating technology, with a spectacular display in the sky over Hamburg, Germany’s waterfront on September 19.  Tasked with creating a drone light show as a guerrilla-marketing action by agency Inovisco Mobile Media, Jens Hillenkötter deployed 30 Claypaky Xtylos fixtures, the first moving head light with a laser light source, to light up the sky with a dynamic backdrop for an intricate drone ballet.
 

AO Drones’ highly agile, elite fleet of drones lit up the sky above Munich’s Olympic Park in October to mark the launch of Deutsche Telekom’s 5G network in the city.  The GPS-guided, 300-strong swarm of drones performed a meticulously programmed 10-minute night-sky performance, creating Deutsche Telekom’s logos and messages in white and Telekom’s brand colour, magenta for the video cameras below.

For the seventh year in a row, the biggest stars of country music performed in a celebration of all things country at the 2020 iHeartCountry Festival presented by Capital One®. Taking place at the Steel Mill with a lighting rig supplied by Bandit Lites, the main stage was hosted by Bobby Bones and featured performances by Dierks Bentley, Lady A, Sam Hunt, Kane Brown, Kelsea Ballerini, Dustin Lynch, Jon Pardi, Riley Green, Morgan Evans, Gabby Barrett, and special guest Bobby Bones.

 Emmy-award winning production company 7 Cinematics, the foremost producer of live-music broadcasts and cinematic video streams, prove that live-streamed concerts can be profitable. In August 2020, 7 Cinematics collaborated with The Avett Brothers to capture their live performance at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Charlotte, NC. To ensure viewers’ safety, fans watched from their cars in a packed infield, while remote fans could pay per view the concert online. Demand for both in person and online tickets was so high, that The Avett Brothers and 7 Cinematics added a second show on October 24th. The two sold out shows combined pulled in 3000 cars and roughly 20,000 online pay-per-views.

More than 55 million viewers watched as President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden met for the final presidential debate at Belmont University. Bandit Lites supplied the university’s exterior and site lighting, illuminating the campus in striking patriotic and branded looks.

Signalling the start of the new NFL season, The Killers staged a special, highly symbolic one-off performance of their anthemic and hugely popular “Mr Brightside” on the rooftop of Caesar’s Palace … for the Las Vegas Raiders who have just moved into the newly completed Allegiant Stadium. Produced for ESPN, the segment’s lighting design was created remotely by The Killers’ long-term lighting designer Steven Douglas, who included 43 x Robe MegaPointes and 14 x CycFX 8 moving LED battens on the rig, supplied by lighting vendor LMG.

Bandit Lites is proud to announce it has been honored with the Award of Merit from the Illuminating Engineering Society’s Chicago Section for its work on The
Fillmore New Orleans with Visual Terrain, Ewing Cole and LiveNation. The IES Illumination Awards program “recognizes individuals for professionalism, ingenuity, and originality in lighting design based on the individual merit of each entry.”