Some nice developments this year - Brad has blessed us with an upgraded WAN link! We should finally have enough bandwidth to do some proper high quality broadcasting for anyone who can't make it in person. Also on that note, I have been playing with Twitch's new multi-bitrate streaming features, and they are awesome! They partnered with OBS and built a new set of output features that are available to any streamer of any size now; if you have a chunky enough nvidia GPU doing your encoding, you can now locally encode and broadcast the entire set of optional bitrates, up to 6 concurrent streams!
This means that I can send a master super high quality 1080p60 feed for any viewers with enough bandwidth to consume that, but I can also send everything down through 240p and allow the client to select among them in case of network congestion or limited downstream bandwidth. Previously, you could always send a single high quality feed up to 1080p60, but if your channel was not large enough there was no guarantee that Twitch would set aside enough video encoding compute power to transcode all the lower formats for you (and so if your viewers couldn't keep up with your master feed, you were out of luck). I've run this at a few shows now and it works wonderfully! I will post some stream details in here when we have everything running.
Wifi will also be a LOT easier - Brad's new network is pretty baller and should cover any needs for any of your devices which aren't participating in backend duties, so the networks I have previously broadcast for everyone can now be dedicated solely to things that specifically need to talk to things on the control networks. I have upgraded my backbone significantly and will have tons of 1G/10G ports available at both ends of the concert and club setup. Can't wait to jam with you all!
And totally unrelated - some of you have expressed interest in monochrome experiments or general appreciation for lovely golden light....I will have a case of 12x late model Philips 35W LPS lamps with me available for $20 each, and a bit of extra packing material for any buyers. If you're interested, save some room to overpack the shit out of them in transit and bring some extra padding if you've got it. These are fairly small as LPS goes (only about 12" long) but pretty sensitive to rough handling, and nobody wants to spill raw sodium on the way home!