Is Carnival cancelled because of Covid 19? Cologne's "Fastelovend" turns out to be flexible and can't be brought down. With our support, the "Röschen Sitzung" and "Funksitzung" start virtually in the stream for the first time.
Swaying and singing people, clinking glasses, Alaaf and Helau – this year everything is different. The Civid 19 crisis is throwing a spanner in the works of the “fifth season”. However, the Carnival revellers do not have to do without their carnival after all. Some organisers of Carnival events are proving to be combative and creative, putting on a programme despite coronavirus and streaming it on the internet. A great idea that G&L GmbH supports with technology and know-how.
The "Röschen Sitzung" proves to be flexible and creative in the pandemic year. Cologne's gay and lesbian carnival event puts on a colourful online spectacle – under the motto "Eurosavision – the Röschen TV show". The almost two-hour show is a worthy consolation and gives fans everything that makes the session distinctive – shrill sketches, crazy videos and offbeat songs. Tickets are sold by the platform Eventbrite. Stream-on-demand will be available from 30 January to 28 February.
Putting on a flashy show: a home game for the makers of the "Röschen Sitzung". A little trickier, however, was the question of how the "Jecken" would stream the programme. This is where our know-how and technology come into play. We build a website for the virtual "Röschen Sitzung" as a digital stage – with a professional video player that runs reliably on all devices, platforms and browsers without plug-ins. It is intuitive to use and does not put any barriers in the way of guests at the virtual session. After all, Covid 19 is annoying enough.
The second pillar of the digital stage is a streaming system from our partner Akamai. The video of the TV show is on a farm of cloud servers, transcoded into multiple bandwidths. The system detects whether a guest of the session is surfing with WiFi or mobile data and automatically outputs the appropriate format. Whether internet TV or smartphone, streaming fun without interruptions is thus guaranteed for all "Jecken". By the way, even if a single cloud server should go down due to a power failure or fire, for example. Because we operate the show with high availability and multiple backups. In an emergency, the stream simply switches to another server – after all, the show must go on.
We are also building a kind of digital box office for the virtual "Röschen Sitzung". On the event site, there is an input field under the video player. Guests enter the ID number of their ticket here. Via an interface to the ticket seller Eventbrite, our system checks whether the number belongs to a paid ticket. If it does, nothing stands in the way of streaming the show.
At the "Funksitzung", Carnival has been showing its funky side since 2008 – in the spirit of funk legend James Brown. Local heroes and international artists share microphones and turntables. Actually, because Civid 19 also gives the funk session a run for its money. As a free consolation, the organisers will be live streaming from the Luxor in Cologne. Also with our support.
The stream will be available on an event site, YouTube and Facebook from 8 p.m. to midnight on 12 February – just like at the "Röschen Sitzung", realised with professional products. Another great example of how the pandemic can't quite bring the cheerfulness of the fifth season to its knees. With this in mind, have fun at the virtual carnival and streaming Alaaf!