Hippotizer at Cellcom Volume Festival, Jerusalem

April saw a first in festivals: The Cellcom Volume Festival, an interactive social media event, had the entire audience logging on from home via their webcams to watch 11 concerts over a period of five days.

This was an innovative concept launched by Israel's biggest mobile company Cellcom, who also arranged a YouTube takeover, created by McCann Erickson Israel.

The artists, including some of Israel's best-known performers such as Mercedes Band, Monica Sex, and Moshe Peretz, performed in a studio especially set-up for this live Internet music festival.

The large background screen of 131' x 10' / 5120 x 384 pixels curved around the stage, and via webcams, the audience's feeds were placed on this screen. The webcam's live feed was sent to a computer outputting from 5x5 to 2x2 grids which were fed into a video matrix 16x16 and controlled via path controller.

In total, three Green Hippo Hippotizer Stage media servers and one HippoPortamus running Hippotizer software Version 3.1 Alpha were used on this groundbreaking event.

The three Stage media servers each had a four-channel-composite-input card plus one default composite input card installed and were all running on 12 layers.

Two Hippotizer Stage units were sending the video-matrixed webcam feeds via four outputs of UberPan to the large LED background screen, while the third Stage controlled eight LCD screens, which were hung in front of the LED wall. These displayed messages from the webcam-viewing public, giving the performers a chance to react to those messages in real-time.

This unconventional set-up allowed for communication between the performers and the audience with the artists being able to respond to questions and even song requests.

The HippoPortamus ran ZooKeeper and Virtual Media Manager, controlling the two stages that were outputting UberPan to the LED wall, and, at the same time, outputting content to the circular semi-transparent LED screen attached to the truss above stage.

Working in conjunction the production company Promarket, Israel's Screenlight provided the LED screens and Hippotizers. Stage and lighting designer Ronen Najar created the original set-up and Shay Bonder programmed Hippotizers and also designed some custom video content to go with the live camera feeds. He commented: "I don't think another system could have done it."

Green Hippo products are distributed in the U.S. by TMB.