When Regional Arts Australia contacted Round Table about producing and live streaming Artlands 2021, the brief was pretty simple; live stream conference sessions across two stages at a single venue in Launceston over three days. While there was a little more to it than it sounds, and it was very important that the stream was broadcast quality, it seemed like a pretty straight forward job.

Enter the global pandemic. Covid restrictions and Tasmania’s closed borders threw a number of spanners in the works and forced us and the team from RAA to reinvent the entire format of the event. What was originally a simple streaming gig, soon morphed into a complex hybrid event with five cultural hubs around Australia, around eighty guests and Auslan joining via their home internet connection, and a scaled down version of the original conference in Launceston - all collaborating in real time via two independent broadcast systems used in synchrony.