Tickets to see Lianne La Havas at Scala in London sold out as soon as they went on sale a few months ago. Considering how rapidly Lianne’s fanbase has grown, both locally and internationally, we decided to make the gig accessible to all her fans by live streaming the show online.

Not only could fans watch the show from the comfort of their own homes, they could make a night of it in London. We hired The Big Chill House, just a few doors down from Scala where we set-up a projector and plasma screen for fans to watch the live stream together.

Managing all the technical aspects of this project was a huge endeavour. I hired Metropolis Studios to handle the filming and streaming of the show, while I worked on getting the website and Big Chill screening ready.

To expand the shows reach even further I commissioned Powster to build a Twitter crowd like the one we used for Biffy Clyro. Fans could join in the virtual crowd by tweeting #liannelive. Kate Brighouse designed the page and Powster put all the elements together.

We wanted the concert to be accessible on mobile devices so the page detected what device the viewer was using and displayed the ideal player: a standard Flash player for desktop browsers or an HTML5 one for mobile playback. Our international team secured placements on a number of high profile websites like rollingstone.de. I created a responsive page to hold the Flash and HTML5 players. I then generated a range of different sized embed codes so that the online editors could easily host the live stream on their own sites.

The day before the show I set a redirect rule to make the live stream and twitter crowd the home page on liannelahavas.com.

To ensure the big screens at the Big Chill House always displayed something engaging, I built a custom page to fill the screen and display the Twitter crowd. I could then easily switch between the twitter crowd and the live video feed when ther time came.

The gig was incredible with Lianne and her band putting on a phenomenal show. Everything ran smoothly so the live stream looked and sounded amazing, both online and on the big screens at the Big Chill House. The #liannelive hashtag worked like a charm and made the event a trending topic in London, Dublin, Paris & Belgium.

Running a campaign with so many elements left a lot of potential for errors, but we covered all the bases and the night was a huge success.