Around The World In 80 Milliseconds

Remote Recording Network and Riedel Communications were very happy to receive the 2020 IBCInnovation Award for our joint project Around The World In 80 Milliseconds. For the world’s first fully decentralised remote show production, our team connected camera operators, lighting designers, video directors and sound engineers scattered across the globe, proving once and for all that it is possible to remotely control an entire music event production.

It was the first fully remotely controlled live music event of its kind. ZYRKLE connected key players of the industry to host a performance yet unseen in 2020. Veteran german singer Purple Schulz performed from a studio near Essen, Germany. All controls for production overview, lighting, audio, AV direction and data control came from across the globe, more exactly: from Munich, Vienna, Cologne, Wuppertal, Frankfurt, Berlin and New York. Five years of preparation and development led to the setup that can control a live event from anywhere.

Peter Brandt told the press: “Like everyone else in the entertainment industry, the first lockdown put the brakes on everything; suddenly we had all this time. Rather than put our heads in the sand, we used the downtime to think positively. We were able to do more R&D, testing and investigation into what we needed to make all the various components work together seamlessly: comms, data, internet and hardware/software compatibility. Under normal circumstances, a collaboration of all the companies and personnel on the Remote Project would have proved almost impossible, especially running into the summer season of touring, festivals, sport events and the like.”

“We always felt there was an increasing appetite to find ways of lightening the carbon footprint of a touring ensemble - livestreaming from a single show has already been trialled by a couple of acts with this in mind - and the financial benefits are obvious; trucks, hotels, buses, flights, venue hire - the list is pretty extensive. Despite the vacuum that the pandemic had created and the evident opportunities for our business model, our plans were based on a non-COVID environment and we reached a stage where we felt confident that we could showcase an event successfully to demonstrate the project’s possibilities.”