There are a few models out there that work well for paid-event streaming, most particularly in sports. But those are on a tremendous scale - the economics for those ecosystems are massive, exponentially higher than what Live Phish / Nugs has to work with. In the music realm, Phish has no competitors. There is NO ONE doing what they do in the music space. Yes, there are companies out there that are trying - TourGigs, for example. But none of those webcasts draw any real traffic compared to Phish. There have been plenty of ventures in this space, and they have all failed. TourGigs may not exist in 24 months. And if companies like that tried to work with Phish, they'd be out of their league. Not in the video production end, but the streaming end.

From what I know Nugs has worked hard to build backup/redundancy/failsafe options for streaming from the venue. They have multiple paths going for every webcast, including a recently purchased satellite backup. Last night's issue seemed to be a data center issue, which must have been incredibly frustrating, because that's a third party vendor that Nugs does not control. Also: 9 times out of 10 the stream issues that people experience though (glitchy feeds that cut out) are on the user side, not the server side.

What Nugs needs to do, and quick: explore redundancy at every point in their chain and take a Customer Service 101 class (though they have come a LONG way in this area, at Phish's direction). They simply can't afford to lose any more good will. Phish would be smart to explore alternative vendors that can power the stream in a turnkey way.

I'm sure it was incredibly frustrating for you Bertolet if you were throwing a Halloween party to not be able to connect. I'm sure backstage at the venue they were FREAKING THE FUCK OUT too. Very smart of them to pull the ripcord and port the stream to Youtube last night. That was the nuclear option, so I'm sure it was not an easy decision.

But a little positivity, patience and benefit of the doubt would be helpful here.