Digitaal Theater
Media platform for performing arts
Digital Theater offers internationally oriented performing arts organizations a media platform for reaching and engaging a global audience. The platform features a rich selection of high-quality live and previously recorded video on demand performances.
Digital Theater is an initiative of Holland Festival, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, and Nederlands Dans Theater, in collaboration with Digital Natives and with support from Fonds 21.
The challenge
A reliable, scalable, and shared system
The pandemic accelerated digitalization. After a period of experimentation, ITA, Nederlands Dans Theater, and Holland Festival decided to join forces to jointly create a new media platform.
The main goal was to create a high-quality digital platform based on an overarching shared technical infrastructure, within which the different organizations could work in their own environment. Scalability of the infrastructure and technology was an important requirement to easily deploy the platform for other performing arts organizations in the future.
Due to the pandemic, digitalization has accelerated, both nationally and internationally. This also taught us more about new possibilities, including the artistic value that online presentation of dance can offer.
Creating a Rock-Solid Experience for a Broad Audience
The ambition for Digital Theater is great: the platform had to set the standard in the online theater experience.
For visitors, Digital Theater offers an exclusive and full-fledged theater experience at home; different from an evening of watching movies on the couch. At the same time, the level of user-friendliness had to be very high so that a broad audience can use the platform easily and accessibly.
A successful digital live production brings together many factors. From expert camera and audio work to high stream quality and from clear visitor onboarding to lightning-fast support where needed. Producers, artists, streaming engineers, and support teams work together to create a perfect (viewing) experience.
The success of Digital Theater is therefore determined not only by the user-friendliness for visitors but also by the user-friendliness for the organizations and all the people working together on a production.
The solution
Platform as a Service for Performing Arts
Digital Theater offers the ability to live stream performances and provide pre-recorded performances (temporarily) on demand to a global audience.
A lot of attention has been paid to creating a high-quality viewing experience on various devices. It is also possible and easy to (chrome) cast performances to another screen.
To serve visitors as well as possible, both the platform and the performances can be offered in different languages. Visitors can seamlessly switch between subtitle or audio languages while watching.
Due to the setup of the platform, it is easy to add other organizations, even when they use different ticketing or livestreaming services.
Context-dependent interface
The platform's interface changes based on the context and associated needs of the different visitors. Information is shown to visitors dynamically and based on time, before and after the performances.
The digital prompter also proactively provides visitors with extra nudges to optimize the viewing experience and in case of any issues with the stream.
The design is based on media conventions and effectively guides visitors through the necessary steps for an ideal viewing experience. The interface elements are the same for every organization, with the freedom to customize them and maintain their own look and feel.
A reliable custom platform
To ensure high quality and safety standards, we opted for a custom solution based on Vue.JS. For offering high-quality livestreams and video on demand, we integrated the video platform Mux.
We built a custom CMS with Laravel Nova where the different organizations have different users, permissions, and roles. In the CMS, they can easily create performances, add streams, manage shows, and unlock digital theater productions.
With reliability in mind, a lot of care has been taken in developing backup functionality. If a stream fails, it can be seamlessly switched to another provider such as Youtube, Vimeo, or Amazon Web Services (AWS). To ensure the platform can handle a lot of traffic, stress tests have also been conducted with thousands of visitors simultaneously.
In addition to the integration with Mux and various backup stream options, we linked various other systems that the organizations work with, including ticketing provider Tixly and customer chat Zendesk for live support.
Startup Mentality for Maximum Product Innovation
Achieving online success with an innovative product is a challenge. By embracing the platform strategy of a startup, it was possible to iteratively move towards a valuable product. This included:
- Clear goals and success criteria as a starting point
- Data as a means to make the right choices
- Validation as a constant benchmark
- Continuously translating insights into concrete product improvements
By testing with real users after each sprint, complex functionality, such as casting and audio settings, was iteratively designed, validated, and built.
The impact
Theater at home accessible to a broad new audience
After a period of intensive testing, the first major performance of Digital Theater was offered in April 2023: Climb the Sky by Nederlands Dans Theater. The responses were overwhelmingly positive:
- Users rated Digital Theater better on all fronts than the solutions previously in use.
- The overall user experience improved by an average of 17%
- The process of gaining access to the digital performance improved by 19%
- 14% fewer issues were reported
The performances offered since then have consistently been positively experienced and rated by visitors.
The quality of the streams is also reliable and stable. For example, the average stream quality at ITA's The Damned was 85, while 1500 simultaneous streams were offered.
It is fantastic to experience that a larger and more diverse audience can be reached with livestreams. And not only for audiences from abroad, but also for those who cannot be physically present in the hall. The audience needs to become more familiar with all the cultural digital offerings. With the arrival of this platform, we will continue to invest in this.
The Digital Natives approach
How we make this impact possible
- In a Discovery Phase, we co-created with producers and consumers the foundation for success. Based on these insights, we formed the blueprint for the entire service and the framework for the MVP; excellently offering the core functionality: a seamless viewing experience.
- With a scalable design system, we created a dynamic, adaptive interface for the perfect viewing experience.
- In a strong agile collaboration and a scrum sprint rhythm, we built a product in 7 sprints that meets the needs of the different target groups.
- The technical architecture of the platform based on Laravel (Nova) and Vue.JS created a reliable, solid, and scalable system.
- After each performance, we extensively analyze the results based on platform analytics, video analytics, support notifications, satisfaction surveys, and evaluations. This way, we continuously learn from actual results to continuously improve the product.
The Future of Digital Theater
The platform will be further developed with more functionalities in the next phase. Moreover, the platform will also be accessible to other cultural institutions.
There is so much interesting, inspiring, and fantastic content in the field of performing arts that we want to share with a wide audience in the Netherlands and worldwide. We, Holland Festival, NDT, and ITA, explicitly invite other cultural organizations to join and also make use of Digital Theater as a platform, where we are happy to share our knowledge together with Digital Natives, and to further develop and grow the platform in terms of recognition and usage.
