Live Show: running the show from one screen

Getting to it

Open the event. Admins and editors see a “Go live” button in the top row once the event has a run of show with at least one block in it; when it does not, the button is disabled with the reason written next to it rather than greyed out and silent.

Everyone else reaches a running show without the button. Once a show is on air, a strip appears at the top of every screen in the app saying so, with one tap to the show, and the dashboard marks the event’s row. That is how a viewer, a speaker, or an AV seat gets there.

Starting the show

Starting is for admins and editors. The start screen says the thing that matters most before you press anything: starting pins the run of show as it stands right now, and nothing anyone edits afterwards changes what the live screen shows. The plan is the plan you rehearsed.

A multi-day event runs one show per programme day, so the start screen asks which day when there is more than one and does not ask when there is one. If reading your event’s days involved an assumption, the assumptions are printed above the button, not after it, so you can disagree before the show starts rather than during it.

The same screen reminds you to download the crew PDF and put a printed copy backstage. That is not the software apologising for itself. With no signal at all, paper still wins, and a producer who has run these rooms would tell you the same.

The screen

The header carries the sync state as a word and a colour, the event title, where the show is (“block 6 of 9”, counting today’s programme only), the wall clock in the event’s timezone rather than your phone’s, the pinned run-of-show version, and who has control.

NOW is the biggest thing on the page: the running block, its planned time, the speaker, and a large countdown with a progress bar under it. With two minutes left the countdown turns amber; at zero it turns red and starts counting up as time over. It never advances the show. Nothing in this product moves to the next block without a human pressing the button.

NEXT sits under it, then RUN OF SHOW, the whole day with the current block highlighted and each finished block marked. Crew see the cue line, the room, the speaker’s walk-up song, and the crew notes on the running block, which is the content that makes the screen better than the printed sheet. If the start screen made assumptions about your day, they are repeated at the bottom of the live screen too.

When the night has drifted, the screen says so with a chip. Any block whose expected start is now a minute or more from the plan wears “+10 MIN · MOVED” (or however far it is), on the NEXT card and on its row in the run of show, and NEXT adds a second line: “now expected 9:20 PM.” The planned time stays where it was, so you can always see how far things have moved. The chips are arithmetic, not a button anyone pressed: a keynote that started ten minutes late moves everything behind it, and every device says so. A block that was cut short reads CUT in the run of show; one that was taken out of tonight’s running order reads SKIPPED.

Running it: the person with control

The controls sit along the bottom, inside a thumb’s reach. “Go to next →” is one tap with no confirmation, because a confirmation dialog on the most-used control on a stage is a bug. A double tap is safe: the second tap does nothing, and the block moves once.

“Hold” pauses the show. The NOW card gains a HELD tag with a timer of how long the room has been waiting, the countdown stops, and the same button becomes “Resume.” Time spent on hold is recorded apart from overrun, so a keynote that was held for a fire announcement does not read as a keynote that ran long.

The TIME row gives or takes minutes from the running block: −5, −1, +1, +5. It changes the countdown for this show only; the plan you built keeps its numbers, and the debrief lists time you deliberately gave or took apart from time that ran away from you. It works on the block that is running, and on nothing else.

“More” opens the rest: “Alert the crew,” “Cut this block,” “Cut a later block,” and “End show.” Everything in there takes two deliberate acts rather than one, open and then choose, and the destructive ones ask again, so a thumb aimed at “Go to next →” cannot land on any of them.

“Alert the crew” is one sentence, up to 140 characters, with a level: FYI, HEADS UP, or URGENT. “Send to crew” puts it across the top of every crew screen in the building as a banner in the level’s colour and with the level as a word, because red and amber look alike under a red house wash. Each crew member gets one button, “Acknowledge,” and your copy of the banner lists who has pressed it, by name: “Seen by Sam, Dana.” It never says “6 of 8,” because nothing yet counts who is in the room, and we would rather name the people than invent a total. “Clear” takes the banner down for everyone; the alert and every acknowledgement stay in the log.

“Cut this block” ends the running block now and moves on to the next, the way “Go to next →” does, except that the record says CUT rather than DONE and keeps how long it actually ran. It asks once, naming the block and what comes after it, and the confirm button reads “Yes, cut it.” If nothing is left after it, it tells you that before you press.

“Cut a later block” lists tonight’s running order after the block that is running, with “Cut” beside each one. Cutting takes the block out of the night: it reads SKIPPED in everyone’s run of show, “Go to next →” passes over it, and everything after it moves up, chips and all. Cut the wrong one? The same list shows “Put back” beside it, and the block returns to its place; the record keeps both the cut and the correction. It works on blocks that have not run yet, and on nothing else.

“End show” is the last item behind “More” and asks once more before it does anything, naming the consequence: ending closes the session for everyone watching it, and the log is kept. It belongs to whoever holds control.

If a tap does not reach the server, you are told on the screen, in a sentence that stays there. Either a command applied and is in the log, or the person who pressed it knows it did not. There is no third state.

Who sees what

Admins and editors get the crew screen: the whole day, the countdown, the cue lines and crew notes. Whoever holds control gets the same screen plus the buttons.

An AV / production seat gets the crew screen too, because the cue line is their whole job, and the alert banner with its “Acknowledge” button, because the alert is for them. Crew cannot move the show, and the screen never suggests they can: there are no disabled “Go to next” buttons on a crew phone, only a line saying who is running it.

A Viewer seat gets the executive view, built for a client or a stakeholder on their own device: now, next, a progress rail through the day, one honest status line (ON TIME, RUNNING 12 MIN BEHIND, or NOT STARTED before anything has), and a plain-language list of what has changed. No countdown, no cue lines, no crew notes. The notes are removed on our side before the page is sent, not hidden by the page. When an alert goes out, that list says one did and who sent it, not what it said; the words were typed for the crew, and they are removed the same way. A block that was cut short or cut from the night shows up in the same list, in plain language.

A Speaker seat gets a single card built around their own slot: when they are on, how long until then, their walk-up song, the room, and what is on stage now and next. The crew alert banner does not appear on the speaker card. One honest limit today: the card finds a speaker’s slot by matching the email on their speaker record, and the roster has no place to enter one yet, so the card will say it could not match your account to a slot and show now and next instead. Ask the planner which block is yours.

Control: one baton, and how it changes hands

Exactly one person has control at a time, and the server enforces it. Two devices cannot both believe they are running the show.

There is no hand-over button in this release. Control changes hands one way: when the holder’s device goes quiet for 45 seconds, the header marks them as quiet and any admin or editor gets a “Take control” button. One tap and the show is theirs; the previous holder’s screen becomes a crew screen on its next refresh. So the handover, if you need one, is: lock your phone, and let someone else take it.

The same rule cuts the other way, and it is the thing worth telling whoever is driving. The device only reports in while the live screen is open and lit. Lock the phone, switch apps, or let the screen sleep, and within a minute you read as quiet and anyone eligible can take control. The app does not keep your screen awake in this release, so set your phone’s auto-lock to never for the night, and keep the tab in front.

When the network goes

The screen shows the show. The run of show was cached on your device when you joined, the countdown keeps counting against the last time the server confirmed, and the header changes its word: LIVE while the screen is current, SYNCING once it has been more than thirty seconds, OFFLINE past a minute or the moment a request fails, and NOT SYNCED if this screen has never reached the server at all. Under any word but LIVE, the values are stamped as stale and the header says in a sentence that the show may have moved on.

Controls that need the server switch off with the reason on them, in words: “Can’t advance — no connection since 2 min ago.” No spinner, no error page, no bounce to the sign-in screen. When the phone wakes up or the wifi comes back, it resyncs straight away.

The honest limit: a phone that arrives with no signal cannot load the screen in the first place, because there is nothing on it yet to show. That is the case the crew PDF exists for, and why the start screen asks you to print it.

Ending, and the morning after

After “End show,” every screen reads ENDED with the time, and the countdown stops. The event keeps the session on the live screen for six hours, so a crew member opening the app after the last block sees that the show is over rather than a start button implying it never happened. After that, the Live Show screen offers to start again, pinning the run of show as it stands then, which is how the second night of a two-night event gets its own session.

What the night did is kept in full: every start, hold, nudge, alert and who acknowledged it, cut, and end, with who did it and when. Once a show day has ended, “Show Debrief” appears on the event page with planned against actual for every block, the blocks that were cut short or cut from the night, and the alerts with who answered them. It has its own article.

Editing the plan during a show

The live screen shows the copy that was pinned at start. Changes you make in the run-of-show builder while a show is running do not reach the phones in the room and do not need to be avoided; they simply wait. The next session pins whatever the run of show is by then.

That is deliberate. The plan is not the record of the night, and mixing the two loses both. What actually happened is in the log and the debrief, and the plan stays the plan.

What this release does not do yet

No notifications. Nothing taps a speaker on the shoulder at ten minutes out, nothing buzzes a locked phone, and there is no sound. An alert reaches a crew member whose screen is in front of them; if the screen is not in front of someone, it is not telling them anything.

No reordering. The blocks that have not run yet stay in the order you built. You can cut one out of the night and put it back, but you cannot move it earlier or later, and that is the next piece of Live Show. planetevents.io/roadmap says where it stands; if it and this page disagree, the roadmap is right and we would like to hear about it.

An alert goes to the whole crew or to nobody; there is no way to send one to the sound desk alone. There is no queue for commands made with no signal, no way to ask the holder for control while they are still active, and no apps yet. Rough edges are part of the deal in beta, and the rest of Live Show is still ahead of us.