I am the TD for London Fringe (London Ontario Canada) which is a member of CAFF (Canadian Assoc. of Fringe Festivals, however, we have many American Members).
Orlando Fringe has been live streaming their festival over the last two weeks. It's been really informative to see what they've been doing right, and doing wrong, along with the NAC (Canada's National
Theatre in Ottawa) has been funding artists to do live streams daily since quarantine started.
Victoria Fringe also has the "UNO Fest" that ran late April where they put their entire festival online (had to cut any shows that were not able to do it).
I am currently looking towards possibly putting London Fringe and Summerfolk (a mid-sized folk festival) online in August/September, so looking to what others have done and their issues/successes will be very informative.
UNO Fest had some live stream components I am told, but also put content behind a paywall using VIMEO. Videos were up for the duration of the festival, plus a week or two to give people who bought "tickets" a chance to watch them. They were then locked down but kept online for the producing companies to be able to view/use.
ZOOM has been by far the most used for live streams that I've seen so far, they are often "cast" to youtube or facebook live, but
ZOOM has been used to allow multiple participants to work together at a distance.
Orlando Fringe's Flashlight
Cabaret is a great example that I watched earlier. A Live stream from participating companies from all over the world, doing short "skits". The "hosts" were in Australia (where they are in lockdown) but the stream was operated from Orlando. Tomorrow CAFF is having a meeting where we expect Orlando to detail their experiences of the last few weeks and I am looking forward to it.
Another Orlando Fringe live stream I saw had the 3 members of a group streaming via
Zoom to FB Live, along with a small "digital audience" of supporters to engage in audience participation required for their show. It worked very well, I've been thinking of incorporating something like that possibly.
The stream tests I've done so far I've utilized
ZOOM, and OBS Studio so far. I also have an ATEM Mini to use on my end, that I tried having one input from a
QLAB computer for an video and audio feed I could
switch to. I hope to use
ZOOM to engage outside participants.
So far the real issue I've seen is with the
latency. Any
HDMI signal adds
latency, the ATEM Mini adds
latency, then the stream itself adds a lot. I've seen musicians successfully
play together over
ZOOM but it isn't without problems. The more participants (and the worse the connection) the worse the problem gets. And then there is also an added
lag to the audience if you are looking for live chat participation.