There’s a new way to watch live music in Johannesburg and this time you don’t even need to be there.  In fact, you don’t even need to be in the country, writes Greg Bester.

Skyroomlive.com is a website where you can view live webcast performances of popular South African bands and artists that go out in real time across the world.

This is actually quite a leap forward in web-based content streaming for this not-so-little country of ours; its creators claiming it’s a well-timed foray into the future and I’d have to agree. Accessibility is not the issue on the table at the moment either, but rather to show South Africa and the world that it can be done and that we can do it.

And they have done it!

Skyroomlive takes place at an intimate venue on the rooftop of a skyscraper in the middle of the Joburg CBD with the city-scape as a perfect backdrop to the performances. As I patiently waited for the evening’s artist, HHP, to perform, I was given a tour of the venue, the technology behind the project and introduced to all the parties involved.

Skyroomlive has been put together by the concept’s creators, Mark Daubeney and Eban Olivier of Mushroom Productions, supported by Gearhouse SA, Mastermax Productions, SA Backline Co and other non-technical sponsors. My tour guide for the evening was audio engineer Johan van der Colff from Mastermax who graciously gave me the technical run-down of the show.

All FOH mixing and stage monitoring is handled by Gearhouse and their house engineer; simply introduced as Frikkie. Overall the Soundcraft GB8 / JBL PRX system is more than sufficient to handle whatever the music throws at them, and later on, the quality of the mix proved to be excellent. They have a good selection of microphones up there too and it really comes through because the quality of the live music was of a high standard. But the FOH mix is not what you’re hearing when you log on to Skyroomlive.com and that is where Mastermax Productions comes in.

Mastermax Productions handles not one, but TWO multitrack recordings of the performance and the actual webcast mix, which is handled by Johan from a small room, tucked away one storey down. However, upstairs next to the FOH console is a Pro Tools HD system, which is where the backup recording takes place, fed from the direct outs of the FOH console. An active mic splitter is used for the system to accommodate the sending of each discrete channel into a Soundcraft stagebox with the MADI protocol, which is then sent down to the Vi1 console in Johan’s room. Here, a single MADI optical cable is connected to a SADiE LRX2 system for the main multi-track recording.

The mix is then sent via a stereo analogue signal to another room next door, which is Mushroom Broadcast and Eban’s domain. Here all video cutting and direction of the show’s four HD cameras take place in real time on a state-of-the-art Blackmagic system, encoded on a high-spec Mac Pro with Flash 5 for streaming on the spot, and fed directly to the web. I was not given too much background information on the nature of the connection and the where’s and how’s for security reasons but suffice it to say that the signal was fed via a high speed router to a couple of local stops in between and finally on to Montecasino, where it is plugged into the high bandwidth internet pipeline and sent off to the world.

Skyroomlive.com is a new leap forward in digital content streaming and live music in general for South Africa. Granted, not everyone has high speed Internet yet, but I was able to get the concert to stream steadily on my phone via regular 3G, which makes the situation hopeful for the future. The more and more Internet access grows in this country, the more we will see concepts like this present themselves and quite frankly I find it exciting.

Just remember who did it first. Skyroomlive.com!