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Why There Is No Outside Lands Livestream in 2018

Updated: Jul 22, 2019 15:52
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The livestream is not happening, people. This promo is from 2015.

Sorry, but you cannot watch Outside Lands online in 2018. The San Francisco music festival will not have a free online stream this year, so if you really want to see it, you can still get tickets or try to find a cozy spot outside the fenced area.

We’ve confirmed with a festival publicist that there will not be an Outside Lands livestream this year. This is not Outside Lands’ fault.  Their livestream partner abruptly went out of business 11 days ago, and that company’s on-demand video archive of previous years’ Outside Lands sets have all been completely deleted.

That company was called Go90, who you’ve probably only ever heard of on the one weekend of all year when you’re looking for the Outside Lands livestream. As we see above, Go90 went belly-up not even two weeks ago on July 30.

Verizon blew a reported $1.2 billion trying to make Go90 happen, but it never caught on. They splurged on having Kanye play their launch party in 2015, and Outside Lands was one of the marquee annual streaming events for the last two years. But somehow a “mobile-oriented social entertainment platform” couldn’t ever figure out how to make any money, or gain an audience, or even make their billion-dollar platform function reliably.

“A year after Go90’s launch, content partners were complaining about video view counts in the ‘thousands,’ and jokingly calling the platform ‘slow 90,’” writes Sahil Patel on Digiday.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Outside Lands is done livestreaming forever. Their livestream partner went out of business 11 days before the event. This could just be a one-year blip, and Outside Lands might be streaming again with a new partner next year and in the years to come.

But for this year, broke and/or lazy Outside Lands fans who wanted to just stay in and watch Janet Jackson and Florence + The Machine all ‘Weeknd‘ long will have to actually, you know, go outside.

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Joe Kukura- Millionaire in Training

Joe Kukura- Millionaire in Training

Joe Kukura is a two-bit marketing writer who excels at the homoerotic double-entendre. He is training to run a full marathon completely drunk and high, and his work has appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal on days when their editors made particularly curious decisions.