Waikiki Steel Guitar Festival Live-Streamed

July 16, 2018 • Addison Ching • Festivals and Conventions

The Friday and Saturday evening Waikiki Steel Guitar Week programs were live-streamed on Facebook. More than 400 viewers throughout the world enjoyed live performances on Friday night, and about and over a thousand viewers enjoyed the Saturday evening program. The live-streaming was done by Scotty Wong, owner and operator of Huana Productions LLC. According to Scotty, "Although we may have had some cross-posting issues we still reached over a thousand people viewing online."

Links to the live stream were made available on the Royal Hawaiian Center's Facebook page, and on the Waikiki Steel Guitar Week and Festival Facebook page. More than a half dozen additional shares of the feed helped expand the Facebook coverage of the event.

Live-streaming extended the event reach beyond the physical boundaries of the Royal Grove stage and allowed viewers from all over the world to enjoy the steel guitar presentations. This helped the mission of HIMELE, producer of the event, to promote and perpetuate Hawaiian culture and the Hawaiian steel guitar. Live-streaming is preferred over audio-only Internet radio broadcasting because it incorporates both video and audio components.

Because of the success of live-streaming and the ability to share festival activities worldwide during the festival, live-streaming may be extended to future festivals on Kaua'i, Maui, and Hawai'i island.

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