VyRT

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

~ the last words ~

vyrt.com does not go anywhere on its own any more. it sends you to a thirty seconds to mars page, which is roughly what it always was underneath: a band's own broadcast setup that got a company name and a domain and was offered to other people.

the thing worth recording is why leto built it. streaming a concert in 2011 meant finding a sponsor, because a free stream is an advertising product and somebody has to pay for the bandwidth. the sponsor then owned the player and everything printed around it. leto's position was that an audience willing to pay for a ticket to a room would pay for a ticket to a stream, at which point no sponsor was needed at all. that is a straightforward idea and it was unfashionable for about nine more years.

the first broadcast went out on 7 december 2011: tribus centum numerarae, billed as mars300, the band's three hundredth show of the into the wild tour, played in new york at the end of a two year run that got them a guinness record for the most concerts inside one album cycle. the platform picked up best online concert experience at the o music awards the following june. after that it did things a livestream company was not expected to do, like screening the documentary artifact in august 2013 and running kubrick's the shining in february 2014.

none of this reached me and it was never going to. vyrt was built around one fanbase and sold to that fanbase, and the echelon were not a group i belonged to. the broader point is that in 2011 i had a ttnet line that could just about hold a youtube video at 360p, and the idea of paying money in advance for a live video feed from california would have been a bet on my own connection that i would have lost.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

the vocabulary tells you what the product thought it was. a professional broadcast was a vyrt and a rebroadcast was a revyrt. then there was the vyrt violet, an unannounced video chat from wherever the artist happened to be standing, and that is the interesting one. it is instagram live, several years early, on a platform that had to build the thing by hand instead of receiving it as a free feature from a billion-user app.

underneath it was rented. the site ran on ruby on rails and heroku and the streaming itself was white label, which means vyrt was never a technology company pretending to be a media company. it was the other way round, and that was the correct call for a business that had to work on one night every few months.

~ the fall ~

the numbers are the problem. by 2015 vyrt reported 3.5 million requests a minute during a broadcast and just over five thousand subscribers. those two figures describe a service that spikes enormously and then goes quiet for a quarter, which is the hardest possible shape to run a business on. the artists who came through, gerard way and linkin park and the janoskians and the jonas brothers, came for one event each rather than as residents. business news daily's postmortem puts the blame on two things: no stable ongoing funding, and an expansion into merchandise and shopping that a company this size could not carry.

the carnivores tour stream from the hollywood bowl on 15 september 2014 had a security breach attached to it, which is what happens when a small operation handles a large night. by may 2017 leto had taken a chief creative officer job at fandor and a promised vyrt partnership out of it never appeared. the final proper broadcast was an at&t sponsored concert from camp mars in malibu on 12 august 2017, which is a sentence with a sponsor back in it.

~ the funny part ~

in march 2020 every touring musician on earth discovered that they needed exactly what vyrt had been for nine years, and vyrt was already three years dead in everything but the domain registration. the thing it had proved, that people will pay for a stream if the stream is an event rather than a broadcast, got proved again by everyone at once, on twitch and instagram, by anybody who could stand up a paywall in under a month.

then in december 2020, in the middle of the year of the paid livestream, vyrt.com stopped being a website and became a redirect with a farewell note on the other end. the platform that was early got its confirmation and its obituary in the same twelve months.

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