Evntlive

» see evntlive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A streaming service reaches exactly as far as the acts on its schedule, and Evntlive's schedule was the american touring circuit. Bon Jovi one week, a country festival in the Catskills the next. Nothing on that calendar was aimed at anyone watching from Ankara, and a set that starts at nine in the evening in New York starts at four in the morning here.

The company was founded in Redwood City in January 2012 and opened its beta to the public on 15 April 2013. The pitch was a venue rather than a video feed. Several cameras ran at once and the choice of which one you watched was handed to you, with a chat channel running alongside the stream so the audience could hear itself.

It had raised about 2.3 million dollars in seed funding, and Vint Cerf was among the people who put money in, which is a strange name to find on the cap table of a concert site. In under eight months of public operation it streamed hundreds of performances. Bon Jovi and Wale on the artist side, plus full festival days from Mountain Jam and Taste of Country with the Lumineers and Willie Nelson on those bills.

On 6 December 2013 Yahoo bought it for an undisclosed sum. The team went to the video group to work on Screen and the music products. The site stopped and pushed its visitors to Yahoo Music and Yahoo Screen, which is where they were told the concerts would be from now on.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the virtual venue ~

The interesting engineering was the camera switch. A concert broadcast is normally one person's edit of six feeds, and everybody watching gets that person's taste. Evntlive shipped the feeds and let you cut your own, which sounds small until you count the bandwidth: every extra angle is another full stream leaving the truck.

Around that it hung the things a venue has and a video player does not. Chat while the set ran, and a link to buy the record before the feeling wore off. The bet was that the reason people go to shows is not the audio quality, so a streaming concert had to reproduce the room rather than the recording.

~ the pay-per-view part ~

Some shows were free and some cost money, which in 2013 was a live question rather than a settled one. Nobody knew whether a person who would pay eighty dollars to stand in a field would pay anything at all to watch the same field on a laptop, and the honest answer for most of that decade was no.

What changed the answer was not a better product. It was 2020, when there was no field to stand in, and the paid livestream became briefly normal because the alternative was nothing. Evntlive was seven years early with roughly the right design and no reason for anyone to need it yet.

~ what yahoo wanted ~

This was the middle of Marissa Mayer's buying period, when Yahoo took dozens of small companies mostly for their engineers and closed almost every product attached to them. Evntlive fits that pattern cleanly. The staff were absorbed into a video effort that was supposed to make Yahoo a destination again.

Yahoo Screen was shut down in January 2016, about two years later, after the company wrote off an enormous amount on original programming. So the acquisition ended twice: once on the day the concert site went dark, and again when the thing its people had been moved onto went dark too. Nothing that Evntlive built survived either closure.

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