Well, we’ve been debriefing and working hard since the first show on Friday and thank you for all your really constructive and detailed feedback.As the first viewers for our TLR Live Online gigs, we thought we owed you some feedback of our own. The general consensus was that it worked really well and you enjoyed it. However, as we knew there would be, there were some technical issues, so I’ve listed these below, what we have done and can do about them. In no particular order:
- Full screen access – this was one that came up quite a lot and must have been annoying, especially for those of you casting to a large screen smart TV. You’ll be glad to know that we’ve found the problem, or rather the guys at Zidivo, who are hosting it to our website did, and we’ve now changed the code and had a few people who had the problem to test it on the recording of the show now on our website, and it works! Hooray! Give it a go yourself if you haven’t already.
- Login problems – a few seemed to have issues here, which could have been in part down to us starting a little late (see point 3 for the reasons why). When you follow the link – which you can do at any time after it comes through – you’ll get a page with the gig title and some text and a black page. Some of you may have the login boxes to fill in, but for some reason, some may not. Don’t worry, this may be because your browser may have ‘remembered’ you, the stream will start. Around ten minutes before the show is to start, the stream window will appear with a picture of the TLR stage and a banner telling you the show will begin shortly, just be patient and it will appear. You can then hit the full screen icon.
- Volume disparity & audio to video latency – the reason we were a little late starting was that we had a real panic just before going to air when we discovered that Luke’s set up would not work in our studio environment, so we had to rely on the fall back, which was just him doing the whole show just via his laptop camera and mic. Big lesson learned: when you think you’ve tested, test again anyway. In the end it went pretty well, largely down to Luke’s ability and his stage presence. However, it meant that we didn’t have time to check our relative microphone balances. It would also have had an affect on the synchronicity between voice and vision, although some of that can also rest with the viewer’s set up. However, we will remedy the volume balance for the next shows and we also hope that we can reduce the latency by getting artists wherever possible to wire straight to the router with an ethernet cable. An ethernet cable direct to router will also help viewers with a smoother and more solid connection too. They’re not expensive and, as we’re likely to be streamers for several months, it may well pay to at least consider it, especially if several other wifi devices are active in your household. Or alternatively, switch all the others off.
- Vodaphone broadband blocking – this was a problem for a few people. One of our viewers managed to solve it in a few minutes by signing in to his Vodaphone account and he gave us these instructions (thanks Tim Bleazard):
‘When I went onto the link using Google Chrome on my Chromebook the video was a grey rectangle with a message saying my.zidivo was unavailable. I decided to try and open zidivo.com in a new tab to see if there was an issue with the site and it showed a Vodafone blocking page. I went to the vodafone web site and logged in . I scrolled down to the Broadband section and clicked on Manage MY Controls. I clicked on Manage Content Control Profile. I had my settings set to Safe and changed it to Off.’
We hope all the above helps because we really want and need this to work for all of us, TLR, musicians and especially the fans without whom none of us would be here. Many thanks once again for all your support and hope that you’ll join us online again in the coming weeks.
Very best wishes and keep yourselves and loved ones safe
Ron & Hilary x
