Innovating livestream events with real-time audience interaction - amplifying culture worldwide

Live comedy performance is worth millions to the UK economy every year, but income is heavily skewed towards a small number of famous performers. For the majority of performers and venues - it is a financially precarious market, and is yet to recover from the pandemic. NextUp are leading the way in developing new innovative ways for live comedy to reach bigger audiences, increase revenues and improve accessibility to ensure a robust recovery for a creative sector where the UK leads the world.

With 100s of high quality shows being created and performed every year, the potential to amplify their reach and revenue through live streaming is huge. However, current systems lack scalability potential and more importantly: interactivity. Comedians talk to audiences, they work off the crowd and foster hilarious shared experiences - this is what brings tens of thousands to clubs around the world on a nightly basis.

With extensive user, venue and performer testing, we're developing an innovative solution specifically for live comedy that enables audiences to donate and interact during performances - translating and amplifying the magic of live comedy like never before.

A part of NextUp's aim to scale this idea, seamless infrastructure is required for onboarding venues and reporting which enables contracting, viewing stats, and payment without the need for manual intervention. Developing this tech for an integrated 'Self-Service Portal' for comedians and venues will be essential in order to scale this idea globally.

We will test the final prototypes (the interactivity module and the self-service portal) in situ, by digitising multiple venues, empowering them with training, streaming technology and a platform so they can earn additional revenue from an audience of global comedy fans.

This innovation will make the nature of interactive live comedy more accessible than ever for those who are unable to make the performance in person, as well as enabling venues to weather low audience numbers resulting from Covid-19 or other reasons - future-proofing revenue for them and performers for years to come.

Live comedy brings people together, breaks taboos, offers alternative perspectives and of course makes people laugh. We think the UK's comedy scene is the best in the world, the content is there - and by innovatively streaming it worldwide- it has the power to connect and touch the lives of more people than ever before.