Imagine your favorite band is playing in New York, at Rehab or The Living Room, and you just can’t make the show.
Or can you?
Bethlehem-based rVibe, a community-based online music download site, has expanded to include live streaming audio and video of concerts from venues in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia.
“It doesn’t get any more exciting than what we’re doing on the Internet today,” says rVibe founder and CEO Braydon Johnson-McCormick. “There are music sites and there are video sites, but there is not a service that brings it all together. And that’s where we’re headed.”
The site, rVibe-live, has already streamed some 28 artists at ten live concerts–from Ben Arnold at the Living Room in New York to Kill the Alarm at the Double Door in Chicago–and plans to increase that number quickly in the coming months. For a ticket price of $4 or $5, rVibe members can virtually attend concerts at venues hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Using proprietary coding technology, rVibe-live’s streaming video is television quality, four to five times better than YouTube, while the audio is near-CD quality, according to Johnson-McCormick.
“We believe the trend is going to be toward more bandwidth, so we positioned our technology on the high end,” says Johnson-McCormick.
The company currently employs three people fulltime at an office in the Ben Franklin Business Incubator at Lehigh University, and also recently opened partner offices in Chicago and New York to support rVibe-live. The company, which has in past years been a grant recipient of the Southside Bethlehem KIZ program, recently received a $50,000 investment from Ben Franklin TechVentures to help roll out rVibe-live.
In addition to streaming live shows, rVibe-live will expand to offer business services as well, such as live streaming clinics and conferences. Later this month, the company will live stream a Martin Guitar clinic to show how the instruments are made.
Source: Braydon Johnson-McCormick, rVibe Founder & CEO
Writer: John Davidson
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