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Time-shifting a live event

7th June 2021 at 20:26

In the days of purely in-person events, especially with many concurrent tracks, if you missed a session you really wanted to see the best we could hope for was to "wait for it to be published on YouTube" - which was usually weeks after the event (assuming it was even recorded). At the best events you would often find several interesting sessions on in the same time slot!

At this year's C++ on Sea we're already minimising this effect by having fewer tracks (just two for the conference day), but over a longer overall run-time. But another benefit to moving everything online, as we discovered last year, is that the live streams can be made available, unedited at least, soon after the session ends. If we make these archived streams available to attendees then you have a form of "time-shifting" where you can catch up on a session you missed while the event is still ongoing (or shortly after). Last year we did this informally - but it has since become a marketable feature of subsequent events in our community.

So this year the conference day will feature this ability. All attendees will be granted the ability to watch any archived stream (after a short processing delay) up until the time the edited version is published and freely available, anyway.

However, it is worth noting that this only applies to the conference day (Friday). We cannot offer this facility for workshops for several reasons:

  • Instructors are paid a proportion of ticket sales, based on the number of (live) attendees to their session.
  • For many of the instructors, training fees are a significant - or sole - part of their income.
  • Workshops are often highly interactive - with much of the value derived from being part of the live class.


So, while the time-shifting capability remains a marketable feature, please be aware it does not apply to the whole programme, this year. Of course, gaining access to two days of workshops, plus the conference day, for the price of one workshop day on previous years, remains excellent value!