Great British Home Chorus

Groovy Gecko was approached by Decca Records to live stream a series of choir rehearsals on Wednesdays with Gareth Malone, featuring special guests.

These events are recorded and streamed from Gareth Malone’s home studio due to social distancing and isolation measures amidst coronavirus. Our teams sent him equipment and help with IT support remotely for both Gareth and his featured guests, also joining the streams remotely.

Objectives.

Decca Records wanted to live stream a series of Gareth Malone’s weekly live rehearsals featuring special guests. Their target audience are people who normally go to choirs who are now unable to attend rehearsals due to Covid-19.

What we did.

Each week, guests will usually do a rehearsal with warm-ups which we help with. Gareth then asks his audience to send in videos of them rehearsing with him which will be stitched together into a group rehearsal when the series finishes. Each day, Gareth and his live audience work on a piece and we live stream his Wednesday rehearsals which feature remote guests joining the stream.

As this was originally an idea for a BBC show, our first project with Gareth Malone was a live connection with directors who gave him feedback on his content and performance while he acted out an example of what the show would look like. This was a hidden stream that was password protected and we sent 4 PIP’s (Picture in Picture) inside to directors.

Each project was done remotely from Gareth’s shed, so we sent him a camera, some capture cards and bolstered his equipment with laptops and other equipment needed for the streams. We manage every Wednesday stream, as he and his guests join a vmix of audio and visual that is directed to us which we control and send to YouTube. We also give the guests a return feed so they can always see the live video. We talk guests through the tech ahead of the live, make sure they’re up and running, manage technical issues and ensure they can connect properly.

The biggest challenge for these projects is the remote management; Liaising and coordinating with clients connections and tasks completely remotely. Without the ability to send a coding engineer which we normally do, makes remote support more tricky. Each week, there are hundreds of live comments coming through on YouTube chat as viewers love to engage with the live video and send in questions and comments to Gareth. We also built a YouTube comment scraping tool (like our REALM Live Questions tool which we use for other platforms) to feed comments back to the host, in this case Gareth, which Decca Records expressed an interest in, but it hasn’t yet been tested.

the results.

These live streams produced fantastic results with high engagement levels including over 260,000 total views and 2,000 live comments made accross all 7 streams.

watch the streams.