Jujulive.ca

Last night I experienced the future of concert watching and it was through a platform called JuJu Live.

I caught wind of this as Neverending White Lights were going to do a livestream on this website in a few weeks.  This was big news to Neverending White Lights fans considering Daniel Victor had disappeared from the scene for the better part of the past decade.  Rumours of a new album coming out would be squashed and that was that.

But here he was, ready to do a livestream to the comfort of our own homes!  I have never had the opportunity to see him live so when the day came, I plucked down my $3USD ($4 CDN) to see his livestream.

I am no stranger to livestreams.  Every Friday night during the pandemic I would catch Adam Baldwin’s Cross Country Chin Up session and on Saturdays I would check out Matt Mays’ Mantle Music.  It was great to see an intimate performance but the quality of video has been a little lacking.  The audio was great though.  But was there somehow the ability for live-streaming to level up and bring us a high definition experience?

I suppose so and Juju Live did it right!

9PM rolled around and sure enough, the page reloaded with a play button to a video.  I clicked play, and you have the option to have it a smaller size so you can also read the chat comments flying by on the side, or you can choose full screen.

This was a 720p high definition stream and they explain a little about their magic.  They buffer the stream!  So people who are leaving comments are warned that there may be a minute delay because the entire performance is buffered!

It was great.  There were no hiccups to the feed, the sound and video were superb and I’m pretty sure I could have paused it if I wanted to.  What’s even better is that the next day I found that they have archived the video for people who may have come in late or missed it completely.  Gone are the days of buying a concert ticket and missing out on the show because of some emergency that pops up.

For years I have been saying that live concerts need to adopt the pay per view model.  I believe Juju Live is a very strong step in the right direction for this type of service.  It’s definitely a different type of experience.  As Vero put it, these livestreams are very intimate because there’s no crowd interaction so the performers spend more time talking in between songs and sometimes explaining things that you wouldn’t normally see in an arena.

– high quality audio and video

– probably the ability to pause for a bathroom break

– even if there is no ability to pause you can catch the stream again the next day (they say that they will keep it up for a few weeks)

– the price is right.  $4 CDN is a really great price point to get people to tune in.  Imagine a large band like Pearl Jam charging the entire world $4CDN to tune into an intimate concert.

Check out the service sometime, it’s fantastic!