Today, Belgian band Absynthe Minded is exclusively releasing the music video for Space, the first single from their new album As It Ever Was, to radio listeners all over Europe. The video won't be on TV, neither will it be available via YouTube or any other music site. Moreover, you will only be able to watch the video while Space is actually playing on the radio.

Rambla was asked to work together with a host of companies to realize this concept, devised by mortierbrigade together with Absynthe Minded. The song is given a digital watermark (technology by Intrasonics) which is detected by an iPhone app (developed by Momads) as soon as Space starts playing on one of the participating radio stations. As a result, the video becomes available on the mostexclusivevideoever.com (designed by mortierbrigade, developed by Wijs).

To make sure that the video can be started just in time, Rambla developed a dedicated web-service which allows the site to remotely launch the video stream on our CDN. After the clip has finished playing, a making-off video is relayed until one of the participating radio stations starts playing the song again.

Possibly drawing inspiration from last year's successful Audi A7 campaign, Flemish media company "de Persgroep" invited Antwerp based graffiti artist Steve Locatelli to repeat his tour-de-force at Rock Werchter 2011. In the course of the 4-day festival, Locatelli is drawing festival-goers to the stand of newspaper "De Morgen" by spray-painting a fresh canvas each day. A few metres above their heads, a silent witness is capturing and broadcasting this ongoing artistic event to demorgen.be in a 4-day non-stop live stream.

For the setup and management of the live-stream, event agency Happy Few contacted Rambla. At the festival ground, we installed an Axis IP camera which captures video, encodes it into an H.264 video stream and broadcasts this stream to the Rambla CDN.

But since most of us are too time-pressed to linger for more than a few minutes watching the live stream, we were asked to handle the creation of a daily time-lapse movie which compresses the 12-hour live stream into just a few minutes. To this end, the camera posts snapshots every couple of seconds to the Rambla CDN. At the end of each festival day, thousands of still images gathered during the day are routed through the Rambla transcoding engine, resulting, only minutes later, in a caffeine-driven journey from blank canvas to finished work of art.