Splendour XR and the folly of technology
Hey there - this is actually Part 2 of some thoughts on Splendour XR. If you haven’t already, you can read through part 1 here which gives some more context on why this wasn’t a good idea and how it could actually be amazing.
This is a little follow-up to my piece on Splendour XR and how virtual music festivals could work. In that I alluded to multiple technical and communication failures, so this is just a dive into things that didn’t go so well given they had a bunch of people putting up fifty bucks for this thing.
We’re sorry, your band is experiencing technical difficulties
First up, Sansar went down on day 1…
That’s not an amazing start. Looks like their auth system got taken out of action and so nobody could actually get to the content. Eventually resolved, but if you were counting on watching the first few acts you would have had a bad time…
Chromedome
Once we could all log in, I actually spent most of the festival with the main video view from the sansar website chromecasted over to my TV. But the Chromecast experience overall was disapoiting.
It wasn’t proper chromecasting at all. Chromecast was called out on the Splendour XR site as a way to watch in the leadup, which conjures up dreams of how Netflix/Youtube/OTHER_VIDEO_SERVICE_HERE where you open the app on your phone, tap a button and then you’re free to use your phone for doomscrolling while your telly plays the video. Unfortunately the only way to get in Sansar was to share a tab in Chrome from your laptop, or share your entire screen on Android (I’m not sure there was any solve for people on iOS.)
Not only does it tie up your phone if that’s the way you watch, but the quality is significantly worse than having it play directly.
(As I mentioned in the last piece, a good chunk of posts in the text chat were people seeking support in how to get Chromecast working, so I wasn’t the only one to be surprised that a mentioned feature wasn’t really implemented.)
Text chat scrolling
This is pretty nitpicky (well this whole article is), but the text chat on the Sansar site didn’t scroll logically. It would keep getting stuck occasinally, so while watching on the telly I couldn’t see the latest messages. Twitch this aint.
You only relive once
This isn’t a technical issue, just a communication one.
Splendour offered a “relive” pass, watch all the sets for 7 days after the event. No XR experience, just video streaming, all for $20.
Sounds very reasonable - except that Splendour didn’t announce the cost of the relive pass until after the festival, and were vague on the details in early advertising that it was on top of the ticket. A few people were miffed that they had already paid $50, didn’t care about the XR stuff, and were now being asked for an extre $20 to watch things they missed due to clashes or technical issues (check the comments here). Which is fair enough, if people who only wanted to watch the live sets (as I mentioned in Part 1, the genuinely great part of Splendour XR) knew it was $20, no way would they have paid $50 for what’s really a lesser experience.
It’s a miracle that anything works, ever
I mean that sincerly. Technology is really, really, really hard to implement. Other festivals trying to do something in the pandemic age don’t always get things right either (take Glastonbury’s trouble with streams from back in May, there’s a few echos of what Splendour went through…) And besides, it’s not like music festivals are easy to organise even without a global pandemic and lockdowns going on.
But even if I thought Splendour XR's concept was pitch-perfect , the actual execution could have been a lot better.
This is a laundry list of things that went wrong, which is a bit unfair given that the core of the festival (the actual artists and their music) were fantastic. To end again on a bit more of an upbeat note: There’s so much going on right now to connect people to music in new ways from enhanced livestreams through to Travis Scott’s trippy Fortnite concert and 3D livestreams of virtual bands. I can’t wait to get back to The Old Bar and see a band for real, but the evolution of live performance at home is going to be fascinating.