OUTRIDERS
FESTIWAL
How we built an online festival in seven days
and attracted 40,000+ viewers — Outriders · Spring 2020
MARCH 2020 · POLAND IN LOCKDOWN
THE FESTIVAL
WAS CANCELLED.
WHAT NEXT?
When COVID-19 locked Poland down, the planned June 2020 Outriders Festiwal was cancelled overnight. Months of work, planning, and a membership model built around a physical event — gone.
The choice was simple: wait, or build something new. The team decided to build. Within hours of the announcement going out to the community, 20 speakers had volunteered. Almost 1,000 people signed up on Facebook.
Seven days after the decision, the first broadcast went live.
MARCH 19, 2020 · FIRST BROADCAST
"OKNO NA ŚWIAT"
WINDOW TO THE WORLD
Five consecutive evenings. Travellers, reporters, influencers — speaking simply about their explorations, bringing a piece of the world into locked-down homes. No production gloss. No polished format. Pure emergency broadcasting.
The registration form crashed when the announcement went viral. They fixed it later.
RESULTS · "OKNO NA ŚWIAT" + "DOM" · SPRING 2020
EDITION TWO · APRIL 2–3, 2021
"DOM"
HOME
After the test run, every decision was re-examined. Five evenings became two. Start time moved from 9 pm to 8 pm. Presentations shortened from 30 minutes to 18. Short video segments were added to allow speaker swaps between live appearances. An afterparty on Instagram Live closed each evening.
The opening was built around professor Jerzy Bralczyk — Poland's most famous linguist — who had no video connection and called in via landline. The solution: an illustrator Skyped in from her iPad Pro and sketched him live while he spoke, cables bridging the phone to the stream. It became the wow moment the production team had hoped for.
"The shitty story is still shitty in 4K.Jakub Górnicki · Mixer case study · 2020
Focus on curation."
THE PRODUCTION · HOST + PRODUCER · SAME PERSON
BUILT IN A BEDROOM.
BROADCAST TO 40,000.
Jakub was simultaneously host and producer across both editions — a deliberate choice that gave the festival its texture: technically serious, but never hiding the seams.
Hardware: two laptops (one for production, one dedicated to presentations controlled remotely by speakers via TeamViewer), Elgato Stream Deck, Zoom H6, Logitech Brio, mobile internet on all monitoring devices — kept separate from the main wifi. Software: Ecamm Live for production; Skype NDI turning every speaker into a separate video source; Restream.io broadcasting simultaneously to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch; Restream Chat aggregating comments from all platforms in one view.
Audience survey: presentation quality
Audience survey: format preferences
LESSONS · FROM THE MIXER CASE STUDY
WHAT WE LEARNED
You are as good as your weakest link. Don't go crazy on 4K if your speaker's connection is slow.
The shitty story is still shitty in 4K. Focus on curation, rehearsal, test broadcasts.
Audio is critical. The audience will survive 360p video. They won't stay if they can't hear you.
Don't be shy to show you are broadcasting from your bedroom.
Put the camera at eye height. Books under the laptop. That's it.
Go digital and free yourself. Think in hours, not days. Fly in speakers from other continents you never had budget for.
Don't transfer your event to digital 1:1. Transfer its essence — and adapt to the new reality.