It seemed at first that New Year’s Eve would pass quietly by in 2020, but Maarten Schulz of festival platform Follow The Beat had other plans. Maarten envisioned a big online festival, Goodbye 2020, where viewers could choose from various streams and put together their own festival line-up. This way, everyone could end the year in a festive way from the comfort of their own living room.

A number of things still had to be arranged, such as which artists would perform, the locations for recording the streams and also an online video platform for running the streams on New Year’s Eve.

Maarten: “We were looking for a local platform and landed on Blue Billywig. We expected around 500.000 people to watch the streams, so we were looking for a scalable platform that wouldn’t shy away from such numbers.”

In the end, no less than 650.000 viewers watched the Goodbye 2020 live streams. There were 50 streams and each stream had its own line-up of artists. A total of 250 artists performed, providing over 15.000 minutes of live entertainment.

There were plenty of performances to choose from. A selection from the diverse line-up: a comedy show by Howard Komproe, performances by De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig and Suzan & Freek, and hour-long DJ sets by Fedde Le Grand and Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano.

Maarten: “In about two and a half weeks, the entire project was realized from start to finish. Collaborating with Blue Billywig was very pleasant, with a smooth and swift communication back and forth to get everything set up. Additionally, we were also very impressed with the functionality and user friendliness of the platform. If we’re organising something like this again in the future, we will certainly come knocking at Blue Billywig’s door.”