EurHope - streArt

“streArt”, a EurHope team's idea, is a online social platform where artists can stream their performance and earn money.

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IMPORTANT NOTE: our slack channel is "#team-c16-eurhope". However, we changed area from C16 to C18. We participate to the track: Social & political cohesion | Support arts & entertainment (C18)

TEAM BRIEF DESCRIPTION: we are seven friends from Italy. We are all engineers or physicists, but also musicians, drawers and photographers with a strong passion for art.

THE PROBLEM WE ARE FACING: Due to the Covid-19 virus emergency, artists like musicians, actors, painters, comedians are forced to live without the possibility to earn from their performance. Especially if they are not used to the web, performer artists are condemned to wait for a long time without being rewarded for their professional skills. Thus, artists and especially small artists, needs a special support during these hard times. As European citizens, we strongly believe that culture, art, music and entertainment are the keys to strengthen the links between the European countries and they are the driving force of a possible new economy. Never before as during this pandemic, people has given so much importance to art, music and entertainment, which now are the principal component of almost all the EU citizens’ spare time.

THE SOLUTION: streArt

“streArt” is a new interactive online social platform to help performer artists to economically survive to the Covid-19 outbreak and future pandemic or general emergency scenarios. Despite many solutions already exist as music streaming, according to our knowledge the idea to reproduce the “street artist” concept was never explored on the online domain. That is why streArt includes in its name the word “streaming”, but also “street” and “Art”. Artists and especially small artists can subscribe to streArt, book some “spots” and some time and stream their “street performance” all over the world from their room! The videos MUST be live streaming of the artist performance. People shall feel like they are walking through the cities and casually meet “street artists”.

A google maps-based interface guides the user through the world map. She/he may go wherever she/he wants. Each artist is represented by a point in a particular location (spot). If the user clicks on the spot, e.g. a point next to the pending Tower of Pisa (Tuscany, Italy), a video will start in a new window. The video is a live streaming of the artist with the Tower of Pisa as background image. The user can also visit the artist profile to find more info (YouTube channel, Spotify profile…), and can decide to leave a tip. Artists earn money thanks to the tips.

The most important thing is social interaction: users and artists can share opinions and talk to each other by using the chat of the spot. The artist can also encourage interaction by proposing games to the visiting users. For instance, a musician could ask “Which song am I playing?”. If a user guess right, she/he may win something. We would like to build a strong community of users having fun through gamification approaches and supporting the artists.

WHAT HAVE WE DONE DURING THIS WEEKEND? We subscribed to this hackathon without any previous idea, so we discussed about streArt on Friday night evening for the very first time. Since the idea was challenging and needed for many skills and resources, we thought that it was impossible to implement a real prototype within two days. Indeed, we decided to work to build convincing and effective textual and video pitches as output of our project. During this weekend we wrote a detailed description of the idea, to build a robust business canvas and to record the video pitch.

THE SOLUTION’S IMPACT TO THE CRISIS Europe is full of people involved in art. Street painters or musicians are always filling the european cities whose somehow represents a part of the city itself. Many of them have been painting or playing music in the same city for years! When thinking about the most virus-affected categories of people, elders and chronic disease-affected people are the first to come up to our mind. However, there are many categories of workers like artists, and especially small artists, which cannot pursue their activities for months in case of a pandemic. This is a problem since those people may fall in a poverty status. streArt is a solution to overcome this problem and to protect this category of people.

THE NECESSITIES IN ORDER TO CONTINUE THE PROJECT We completely understand that streArt is an ambitious project. It is challenging to design and implement a social media app based on real-time video content sharing. When analysing the technical issues of the proposed solutions, we found out that social networks like Instagram and Facebook took an initial development budget of 300.000 $ and 500.000 $, respectively. During this hackathon, we only worked on the project idea, so the first prototype development still must be accomplished. We think that the Technology Readiness Level of the streArt is currently two (TRL2). The most important thing is to realize a first prototype of streArt on a small scale, e.g. by covering up one or two cities. Once the infrastructure and the web platform are developed, large scale enlargement is only a matter of buying more servers and organize them. Since we are dealing only with live performance, we do not need to store the videos, so the data storage infrastructure will not be so costly. The technical skillset of the team members is only partially enough to cover all the aspects involved in the implementation. That is, more people should join the project. Another important issue is to finalize the copyright agreements, which may be a long procedure since we need to contact each copyright owner. However, when building the business canvas, we thought that the business in consistent and can generate value.

THE VALUE OF YOUR SOLUTION(S) AFTER THE CRISIS streArt can be important during the crisis to economically help artists. However, we think that the value of this platform can also be recognized even after the crisis. streArt is focused on the customers (especially users and artist) experience, with a strong attention to make people interact, create communities and have fun. This kind of experience is not completely fulfilled by competitors like YouTube or Twitch. Moreover, revenues for artists should be higher than with the competitors. That is why small artist could decide to spend much of their time on streArt.

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