Liveon Virgo TV.August 7.

01 · Why We Picked Mux

We picked the best.

We looked at every serious option. Here’s the short version.

• Mux is built for exactly this. It’s like Stripe, but for live video — built by developers, used by major concert PPVs, sports streams, and music events. Best fan experience, best replay support, best fraud and refund tools, fastest to get live, and cheaper than the alternatives at the scale we’re planning for.
• Cloudflare would be our backup. Slightly simpler bill, slightly less polished as a streaming product, slightly more code we’d have to write. Good runner-up.
• Amazon (AWS) is what NBC uses to broadcast the Super Bowl. It’s the most powerful option in the world. It’s also 2–4 weeks of engineering setup, an unpredictable bill that climbs with viewership, and overkill for a single concert. Right tool for the wrong job at this stage.
• Vimeo OTT wanted 10% of every ticket sold. We declined. We don’t share gate with a streaming vendor.
• Self-hosting — renting raw servers and building our own streaming pipeline — is not feasible in 72 days for an audience this size. Reckless, frankly.

“We picked the best in the business — same company that powers the biggest live music events online. We’re not the second-place option for Rod Wave.“

02 · The Platform We Own

The platform is ours.

The website, the fan accounts, the ticket sales, the player — it’s our code. We don’t rent the platform from anyone.

The Virgo TV platform is hosted in our own repository — every line of code under our control. That ownership matters in three ways the artist’s team will care about:

• We own the fan email list. Every Rod Wave ticket sold builds a verified, opted-in list that belongs to Mainstay and Virgo TV after the show — not a third party.
• We control the brand. Virgo TV is what fans see. Not a “powered by” credit. Not someone else’s logo on the player.
• We keep the money. Stripe takes 2.9% + $0.30 to process the payment. Nobody else gets a cut.

03 · End to End

The broadcast path.

Stage to screen, in plain English. Everything has a backup. If anything fails, the audience never notices.

[The stage at the amphitheater]
   │  cameras + sound
   ▼
[Production team's switcher + encoder, on-site]
   │  this is the live show, packaged for the internet
   ▼
[Bonded cellular uplink — suitcase-sized device, 6+ cell networks at once]
   │  unbreakable connection from venue to internet
   ▼
[Mux — our streaming partner]
   │  takes the feed, makes it work on every device worldwide
   ▼
[Mux's global delivery network]
   │  fans get the stream from the server closest to them
   ▼
[Fans on phones, TVs, laptops — at virgotv.com or the Virgo TV app]
   │  each one logged in with their own paid pass
   ▼
[Paying viewer]

Two encoders at the venue, two uplinks, two ingest points at Mux, two delivery paths. Nothing in the chain is a single point of failure. If anything goes wrong on any leg, the audience never sees a hiccup.

04 · Cost to Deliver

The bill, at three sizes.

All-in delivery cost at 12,500 / 25,000 / 50,000 viewers. Excludes Stripe’s 2.9% on the ticket — the only cost that scales with sales.

The insight that matters. Infrastructure barely flexes with audience size. Going from 12,500 fans to 50,000 fans only adds about $5,000 to the bill. Streaming is not the bottleneck — most of the cost is on-the-ground gear and engineering, which are flat.

At a $19.99 ticket and 25,000 sold = $500k gross. Delivery cost is $26,500. Net after Stripe and infrastructure: ~$451,000. Margin: 90%+.

05 · The On-Site Ask

What we need from production.

Plain English version of what the production company provides and what we provide.

Cost arrangement on the uplink kit

The bonded cellular gear is standard professional broadcast contribution kit. The expectation is that the production company owns or rents this gear as part of their day’s work. If they don’t have it, Virgo TV can fund one unit (~$3k) and put our own engineer on site to run it. Either way it’s covered.

06 · Picking The Vendor

What to look for in a production company.

If Rod’s team is choosing the on-site production vendor — here’s the five-question screen.

1. Do they own or have ready access to LiveU, TVU, or Haivision class kit? If they say “we’ll figure it out” — wrong vendor.
2. Have they done IP-contribution streaming for a paid live event before? Ask for the reference. The world is full of AV companies that can run a great in-room show but have never sent a frame to a streaming platform.
3. Will they commit to a dress rehearsal seven days before the show, hitting our real streaming endpoints?
4. Named broadcast engineer on-site through load-out — not a junior op who leaves at intermission.
5. Insurance certificates — production E&O, naming Virgo TV as additional insured for the date.

For Pensacola, the right rental houses come out of Atlanta, Tampa, or New Orleans — that’s where the southeast concert streaming crews are based.

07 · Timeline

72 days to 2026-08-07.

Every gate named, every gate dated.

08 · The Fan Experience

How it feels as a fan.

First-person walkthrough. Buy a pass. Click a link. Watch the show.

1. Fan sees the Rod Wave event on virgotv.com — or hears about it on Rod’s social.
2. Clicks “Buy Pass” — $X for live + 48-hour replay.
3. Stripe Checkout. Phone or card. Marketing opt-in checkbox at the bottom.
4. Confirmation email arrives instantly with a magic link.
5. Day of show: click the link, log in, hit play, watch.
6. One pass = one stream. If they try to share the link with three friends, only the first person to start watching gets in. Same model HBO and Netflix use.
7. After the show: same link works for 48 hours of replay.

If something goes wrong on our side — buffering, crashes, refunds — we have viewer-by-viewer telemetry from Mux that lets us see exactly who had a bad experience and proactively reach out, rather than fight chargebacks weeks later.

09 · The Bigger Picture

What this means beyond one night.

August 7 is the first commercial proof point for the Virgo TV platform. Three things change after that night.

The August 7 show is one night. The platform it builds is the next decade.

10 · Today’s Decisions

Decisions we need on this call.

Five confirmations. Everything downstream depends on these.