Well that was another interesting day at the London Free Press.  It seems that with each passing day we’re getting more people to see that we have an exciting future that includes more than just newsprint.  As we expand our media offering to newer mediums we seem to be reaching a wider audience.

But not all of our experiments will go well.  Today was a case in point.  After several test runs covering a local news conference and our ‘State of the City’ mayoral address, we decided to try live streaming an exciting event in downtown London that would have a wider appeal.

For those who don’t already know there was a reenactment of The Beatles final live performance on a rooftop in downtown London today.  We were made aware of the show a few days in advance and had thus staked out a place on the roof beforehand.  The day before the show we tested our Internet connection, made sure that we had no Ustream firewall issues, did a camera check and satisfied ourselves that we could cover the event live.

The original 1969 rooftop concert in London, England

So off our multimedia editor (@MikeatLFPress) went this morning ready to set up and shoot the event.  30 minutes before the show was to start we had a problem.  The iBook wouldn’t connect to the camera properly for some reason, and then in the frigid temperature the track pad stopped responding.  So our Interactive Manager (@PJatLFPress) hustled over with his MBP just in time to get set up 2 minutes before the show started.  Notice a step that we missed? Yes, we missed the sound check.  So despite Mike’s excellent coup in getting a feed right off of the mixing board, we had horrible sound quality for all but one song of the show.

The biggest frustrations come from two angles: 1) Mike was frustrated in that he felt that we had done a disservice to the artists on the stage and 2) we may have missed an opportunity to reach a new audience who might not have otherwise watched a live event on a local newspaper web site.  Good music attracts people unlike many other things.

So despite the over 1,000 viewers who saw the event we never peaked much above 300 at any given point in the event.  We had hoped to be able to say that there were as many people on the web watching as there were on the street below the band. It appears that many people tuned in, then tuned back out again as a result of the poor sound quality.

Fortunately we shot some great footage of the event from the roof and from the street below.  Mike worked his magic in FCP and the results can be found on the London Free Press video page.

Next time we will be better prepared for such possible problems.  We are undeterred and look forward to our next ‘experiment’.  Thanks for tuning in everyone.

@SteveatLFPress