The Marlowsphere Blog (#58)
The last three blogs have focused on the expanding presence of streaming technologies in jazz clubs, not just in the United States, but also globally. We first described the activities of Brian Gruber’s www.showgo.tv. We then investigated the probable outcomes of televising live events by comparing streaming jazz performance to sports events. The conclusion is: if you televise it, they will come.
Last week we interviewed Spike Wilner, co-owner and manager of the famed Smalls jazz club in New York 
City’s Greenwich Village about their exploration into video streaming. For this week’s blog we interviewed Daniel Gallant, Executive Director of the Nuyorican Poets Café on Manhattan’s Lower East side about the Nuyorican’s streaming activities.
Daniel Gallant previously served as the Director of Theater and Talk Programming at the 92nd Street Y’s Makor Center and at 92YTribeca. He has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Crain’s New York, Time Out New York, the New York Daily News and other periodicals, and has appeared in shows on MTV, NBC, NY1, CBS, the BBC and other networks (including a recent appearance on MTV’s show “Washington Heights”). Daniel has given lectures and led workshops about arts management and social media for the Kennedy Center, BAM, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Google, Chase, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and other entities.
The Nuyorican dipped its toe into the streaming realm in the summer of 2012 but ramped up in the fall. However, Hurricane Sandy has crimped their streaming activities mainly because of the technological impact on Time-Warner’s capability in that part of Manhattan where the Nuyorican is located. They intend to kick back into high gear in the next several months. Before the hurricane the Nuyorican was streaming three or four shows in one week. “We’d like to get back to that schedule,” says Gallant, “but it depends on when Time-Warner manages to get back up to full capability.
When asked what the incentive was to incorporate streaming into the Nuyorican’s activities, Gallant responded: “We’ve been interested for a while in extending our live performances, particularly our poetry slams and Thursday night Latin jazz. We can’t always fit all the people into out space and we want to accommodate our 
audiences. And it’s important to us to reach other parts of the country and other parts of the world.
“We experimented with different ways of streaming, but so far the best case has been made to us by Gander TV who is our current vendor. We were one of the first venues they started working with. The equipment they use is relatively self-contained and self-sufficient. It’s both sophisticated and easier to operate than other equipment that we looked into. Like a lot of small to medium-sized performance spaces, we have a limited staff. We need to know that whatever additional tasks or services we provide that those tasks and services are easily accomplished. Gander’s equipment is pretty user-friendly.”
The Nuyorican has two cameras with the audio fed through the club’s existing sound board. Both the Nuyorican and Gander have the ability to control the cameras via computer. The Nuyorican has two vendors: Time-Warner and Verizon providing two different networks because of the requisite bandwidth.
Says Gallant: “The majority of our programs stream for free, however, for our Friday night slams we charge a slight fee: 99 cents. We want to demonstrate to the public what we’re doing. We want to engage people. We’ve found it to be useful as a promotional tool. We and Gander have investigated the streaming for advertising and promotional purposes. We haven’t settled on anything yet, but my guess is that as we get closer to our 40th Anniversary in October of this year and we work with some of our sponsors and supporters, there’s some promotional and funding opportunities there.
“Another advantage of working with Gander is that in addition to the streaming capability, people can also go online and watch the poetry slams or any of the other events we’ve streamed from an archive. Often, we’ve received requests from the poets themselves, or friends and relatives of the poets, and people from out of town to have access to the events after the fact.
“In addition to the promotional aspects, some of the potential income that might come from this is advertising on the free streams, and building an audience for certain pay-per-view events. Also, we’ve explored the possibility of sponsorships and revenue from universities and educational and scholarly entities that are focused on slam poetry or Latin jazz to give them access to the events on a weekly basis.”
Gallant also commented on the relationship between their streaming activities and social media: “We’ve found through our social media activities—Facebook, Twitter—that those people get most excited about an event that has an interactive element, such as poetry slams and open mikes where the audience provides some of the content for the performances. Those kinds of events seem to resonate more with our social media following because they mimic the kind of relationship people have with social media platforms, which is also interactive. We see streaming as a way to extend the brand recognition and impact.
He also addressed the issue of copyright and permissions: “What we’d like to do down the road is stream most of the events at the Nuyorican. But one of the issues we ran into very early on in the process is the issue of rights and permissions. We have to get permission from the artists to stream their work. That’s something that we’re sensitive to. As we stream more events this is an issue we’ll have to address more and more.”
Please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com if you have any comments on this or any other of my blogs.
Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
April 15, 2013
© Eugene Marlow 2013