Pioneering mobile broadcasting for The Black Eyed Peas
Brief debrief
In the early-to-mid 2000s, 3G brought the first phones that could shoot video with a front-facing camera. Together with Brothers in Art and the Black Eyed Peas, we used them to bring fans closer to the band: the band members broadcast live, unscripted moments from tour straight into the band’s community website.
Closer to the band
Fans wanted real, unfiltered access to the band, and a static tour diary couldn’t give them that. During the band’s European tour, the band members filmed moments on the road with the new 3G video phones, and we streamed them straight to the community site. It gave fans a new way to follow the band, as it happened.
Designing for emerging technology
Live video on the web was hard when mobile data had only just arrived. My main design job was the player inside the band’s community site, which had to feel immediate and personal. We designed it so fans felt part of the tour, not an audience watching from a distance.
This technology allows us to get closer to all the fans world-wide. This is dope.
Live streaming, before it had a name
This was years before live streaming became a standard feature of social media. It showed that video from a phone could bring a band and its online community much closer together, and it became an early model for how artists reach their fans online.
Explore more
Transcript
How we got to work for the Black Eyed Peas is a different story, one I’ll tell you in person. But we built their website for them. And not just any regular website: we built it as a community site, almost a social network for music fans, because there were a lot more people hanging out there than just fans of the Black Eyed Peas. We worked really closely with will.i.am especially, who already back then was a big nerd with big digital dreams, so we were talking the same language. We built this really special place where so many people came together.
One of the cool things we did was hand the Peas phones with cameras that could broadcast to the website. It doesn’t sound so special now, but back then it was not possible yet. We figured out a way to do it. So they went on tour and took their website audience with them, shooting videos behind the scenes and from the stage, and online millions of fans worldwide watched them as they came in.
It was a really special time. We got to experiment a lot, and being able to do that for a band like the Black Eyed Peas, with such an international audience, is amazing.