Monterey Jazz Festival Records

CASE • STUDY THE 54TH ANNUAL MONTEREYJAZZFESTIVAL

The Monterey Jazz into the Festival’s Jazz Festival celebrates Theater, allowing those history the legacy of jazz and without tickets to see expands the boundaries the concerts as they of and opportunities to happened. Interest experience jazz through the creative production soon developed in of performances and educational programs. enabling delivery of The annual Festival is the longest running jazz the performances to John Santos festival in the world, held every September on external audiences. the Monterey Fairgrounds site where it was first The Festival first experimented with streaming presented in 1958. The Fairgrounds today offers media in April 2011, delivering stationary, single- eight stages with world-class musicians over a camera live feeds to the Internet for its Next three-day period, along Generation Jazz Festival, with panel discussions, which highlights top workshops, exhibitions, “StreamGuys made it easy for student musicians from clinics and festivities around the country. across its 20 acres. us to embed the stream in our The Festival, together web page, and provided onsite with representatives The Festival has from local NPR member recorded every personnel and technical support station KUSP-FM, soon artist since its 1958 over the phone throughout,” began conversations inception, with select with StreamGuys audio recordings to establish a releases on Monterey Jazz Festival Records. The streaming media strategy for the 54th recording efforts evolved into a simulcast that Monterey Jazz Festival that September. piped live performances from the main stage

“Streaming has Monterey Jazz Festival. “We wanted the Monterey become more of Jazz Festival stream to resemble a TV special situation a reality for many with a professional, multi-camera shoot.” organizations as people have moved Orr gained immediate confidence that StreamGuys away from dial-up and toward DSL, cable and could help him achieve his goal after meeting with T1, and the Next Generation Jazz Festival gave regional sales representative Kristoffer Taylor to us the opportunity to evaluate today’s streaming discuss options. Orr also had positive feedback experience,” said Tim Orr, Marketing Associate at about StreamGuys from KUSP, the local radio broadcast partner of Monterey Jazz Festival for 31 years. StreamGuys hosts the station’s “KUSP Music Show Player”, which offers weekly music shows 24/7.

Juan Carlos The Festival ultimately decided to stream evening performances from the Night Club/Bill Berry Stage. With performers including internationally- known jazz artists like the Robert Glasper Experiment, Carmen Souza and the Benny Green Trio, Monterey Jazz Festival had the venue, the performers, the production team and the media partners — but no one to deliver it to the world.

www.streamguys.com • [email protected] • Phone: 707-667-9479 StreamGuys used McCune Audio, the Festival’s long-time production its highly scalable, partner, produced the live video & audio, handing solutions virtualized streaming off the synchronized signal to StreamGuys via a infrastructure Wirecast encoder. StreamGuys re-wrapped the to deliver live, original H.264 video stream for delivery to Apple iOS synchronized video and audio streams to desktops, systems, Android mobile devices and embedded laptops and mobile devices. The infrastructure Flash players for web and mobile streaming. delivered H.264 video and AAC+ audio at varying Multiple audio bit rates supported adaptive bit rate bit rates to support an array of user speeds streaming in iOS and web-based platforms, ensuring and media players. StreamGuys also provided that mostly anyone with a 3G, Wi-Fi or broadband embedded media players to the Monterey Jazz connection could stream the performances. Festival, KUSP-FM and NPR’s “A Blog Supreme” — a popular jazz music blog — to give viewers “StreamGuys made it easy for us to embed the direct, simple and free access to the live streams. stream in our web page, and provided onsite personnel and technical support over the phone throughout,” said Steve Laufer, Director of New Media at KUSP. “The stream quality looked great, especially when viewed at full screen.”

StreamGuys provided monitoring services and technical support during the broadcasts, with special focus on encoder stability, signal acquisition and internet connectivity. General support included monitoring the incoming signal and maintaining the health of the server cluster that distributed the content. StreamGuys also provided real-time viewer statistics, allowing all three media partners to confirm the Cole Thompson number of viewers at each site at any time.

With full confidence of streaming Festival, what we do, and give media’s power to reach wider recognition to the artists that benefits audiences, Monterey Jazz Festival are involved,” said Orr. “It was expects to evolve the nature of important for us to partner with the streaming platform at future a company like StreamGuys that events. This includes exploring had the experience to help us “It’s about reaching more potential subscription-based spread that message.” people,” said Orr. “We want models with the assistance of to increase our audiences and StreamGuys. But the ability put something out there that for StreamGuys to simply take inspires people to come to the the performances to a global festival. Jazz needs to grow as a audience was a significant first genre, and using technology in step. a forward-thinking manner is an ideal way to engage a younger “We are trying to use the demographic while gaining more technology available to us to exposure for the festival and the spread the message of the artists.”

Affordable. Reliable. Scalable.