Live streaming a five-hour DJ set from a boat on the Vltava

SUMMER BOAT by Tokátko, Saturday 12 August 2023. The Tyrš riverboat cast off from the Rašín embankment in Prague and spent five hours on the Vltava while five DJs took turns on deck. We streamed the whole thing live.

Five hours without a break. Tokátko, SNBM, DJ HRUSHA, wotty and DJ EDWARD played one after another. To a viewer it is a single unbroken stream in which only the music changes. For the broadcast it means nothing gets a pause: not the cameras, not the sound, not the link out.

The boat moves, and the signal moves with it. There is no socket on a boat you can plug the internet into. Everything that goes out has to go out over a mobile network, and that network changes along the way. The route leads from the centre of Prague into a valley between wooded slopes where coverage is thinner than at the embankment, and the boat will not stop there to let the signal catch up.

The mixing position fitted on one table. We built it below deck by a window just above the water: a vision mixer in a case, a laptop, headphones. Up on deck it would have had nowhere to stand, because the deck is full of people and has no backstage. That is why the camera operator works handheld, right among the guests.

This was the first time we sent a flying camera up. The shots with the whole boat on the river come from it. From the deck you can show the party, but not where the party actually is, and on a broadcast from a boat that is half the point.

Below is a cut from the broadcast: the afternoon on deck, the cruise through the valley, the evening, and the last hour after dark. For the music on its own, Tokátko has his full set from this cruise on his own channel as House Boat Tyrš 2023.