“United We Stream” initiative and media partner ARTE takes the nightclub atmosphere virtual with AWS

Underground nightclubs provide an outlet for dancing, socialization, and general revelry but as the world went into lockdown earlier this year, clubs across the world shut their doors, and for the most part, remain closed. To support these businesses, their employees and talent affected by the European club ban, the Berlin Clubcommission, Reclaim Club Culture and Berlin Worx teamed to launch the “United We Stream” fundraising initiative earlier this year, which began in Berlin, Germany but quickly expanded into 85 other European Cities globally. Designed to safely bring the club atmosphere to your living room, the campaign featured live streams from club locations worldwide, including live DJ sets, and musical performances – all available via the “United We Stream” site and select media partner outfits like the European Culture Channel ARTE. AWS technology played a key role in the orchestration of each live stream, the implementation was realized by APN Partner G&L.

Over the course of six months, more than 1900 performances took place in more than 405 clubs worldwide. All live footage captured on-site was encoded then sent via RTMP to AWS Elemental Cloud Live. Using AWS Elemental Cloud Conductor, the streams were managed and orchestrated, and AWS Elemental Cloud Live then delivered HLS and DASH to Akamai Media Services for live streaming. It simultaneously sent HLS to AWS Elemental Cloud Delta, where a recording was made and trimmed for video-on-demand viewing purposes, and then saved to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.

“The initiative has been hugely successful, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support we’ve received from the local communities,” shared Lutz Leichsenring, Member of Executive Board Clubcommission. “Our collective stream views topped more than 35 million, and together, we raised more than 1.4 million in total worldwide in funds that will benefit those impacted by the extended nightclub shutdown. Thanks to technology from AWS, we had the flexibility and scalability to bring viewers around the world a high-quality stream regardless of the location where we were shooting.”