On 26 October 2019 the Kyiv National Academic Operetta Theatre staged its Musical Evening at the October Palace. We produced it on four cameras, put it out live on Restream ME with paid online tickets, and fed the same cut back to the LED screen above the stage. The theatre's own production lead cut the show.
A theatre selling tickets to a live stream is ordinary now. In October 2019 it was not.
The Kyiv National Academic Operetta Theatre brought its Musical Evening to the October Palace and wanted an audience beyond the hall — not a recording released later, and not a free stream, but a performance people paid to watch as it happened, the same way they pay to sit in the room.
An operetta gala is a hard thing to stream and an easy thing to stream badly.
The material is not one continuous action like a football match. It is a sequence of numbers, each with its own staging, its own soloists, and its own idea of where the audience should be looking. A camera plan that works for the opening chorus is wrong for a duet and wrong again for a full-company finale. The cut has to know the running order, and it has to know the music.
The theatre also wanted two things at once. A stream people would pay for, which means it has to be worth the money and it has to work on the first attempt, because there is no second performance to sell. And a feed into the hall itself, so the people who had come to the October Palace were not the ones getting the worse view of the detail.
Both of those are production problems. The third was the one that shaped the day: the person who understood the running order was not on our crew. They were on theirs.
Wide for the company, a long lens for the soloists, and positions that could hold a number without cutting across the choreography. An operetta gala punishes a camera plan built for a single focal point, because the focal point moves every few minutes and the music tells you when.
The stream went out on our own platform, with paid online tickets in front of it. That is a different product from a public broadcast. A paying viewer has bought a seat, so the feed has to be stable, protected, and start on time — a stream that stutters through the first number is a refund conversation, not a technical note.
The live cut fed the screen above the stage, so the audience in the hall got the close work — hands, faces, the soloist's expression — at the moment it happened. One production served the room and the stream at the same time, rather than the room paying for the stream's existence.
We could have brought the desk we prefer. We brought a Datavideo hardware mixer instead, because the theatre's own production lead was going to cut the show, and a physical panel with labelled buttons is something you can learn in an afternoon and trust under pressure. They knew the running order, every entrance and every musical cue, better than any visiting director could learn in a day. Our job was to put that knowledge behind <a href="/en/work/betsafe-lkl-rrm-vilnius-2019/">a control surface they were comfortable with</a>, and stay out of the way.
They knew every entrance and every cue in the show. We did not need to teach them to direct. We needed to give them a desk they could drive.
Kostiantyn Moseichenko — Well Run
The performance went out live, to a hall and to an audience that had bought tickets to watch it from somewhere else, on a platform we built and run ourselves.
Two things about that are worth stating plainly.
The first is the date. This was October 2019. Within five months every theatre in Europe was trying to work out how to sell a stream, and most of them started from nothing. The Operetta Theatre had already done it, on a real gala, with a paying audience, and knew what it involved.
The second is who was at the desk. We did not bring a director and hand the theatre a finished product. We brought the rig, the platform and the engineering, and we put the cut in the hands of the person who knew the show. That is not a compromise on quality. Understanding the material is most of what a live cut is, and nobody in that building understood it better than they did.
The audience pays for access, the way they pay for a seat. That changes the requirements: the feed has to be protected so it is not simply shared, it has to be reliable enough that a stutter does not become a refund, and it has to start exactly on time. We deliver it on Restream ME, our own platform, with ticketing on the front.
Yes, and it usually should. At the October Palace the live cut ran to the LED screen above the stage as well as to the stream, so the audience in the hall saw the close detail at the moment it happened rather than the stream getting a better view than the people who came.
Because they knew it. A live cut of a musical gala is mostly knowledge of the running order, the entrances and the musical cues. The theatre's production lead had that; a visiting director would have spent the day acquiring it badly. We chose a Datavideo hardware mixer, a physical panel with labelled buttons, so the tool matched the person rather than the other way round.
Four cameras cut live at the October Palace in Kyiv on 26 October 2019, delivered to Restream ME with paid online tickets and to the LED screen on stage, for the Kyiv National Academic Operetta Theatre's Musical Evening.
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