As livestreaming settles into a familiar format — a single camera feed, a chat window, a sense of watching from outside — a new industry initiative is testing whether remote audiences can be made to feel like they're actually there.
IFeL: Immersive Festival Live – Remote Presence at Scale brings together broadcasters, technology companies, universities and creative partners to explore how spatial audio, XR, augmented reality and ultra-low-latency video could transform passive livestreams into shared experiences, letting remote audiences interact with artists and fans in real time. The project runs under the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme, and this September it hit a milestone: a Final Showcase at IBC2026 that revealed proof-of-concept results built on intensive, on-site testing with DJs, orchestras and two flagship live events — the Montreux Jazz Festival and The Voice of Holland.
Montreux's role has made it the initiative's most visible test case. The project's stated aim is an end-to-end workflow for immersive live streaming from music festivals, combining multi-perspective video, viewpoint-aware spatial audio and interactive audience participation. In practice, that means capturing festival performances from far more angles than a conventional broadcast — UHD VR viewpoints from the audience and backstage via steadicam cameras, and the stage via robotic cameras — while remote "virtual fans" experience full immersive audio captured at the venue, layered with the main concert feed.
The more striking piece is the two-way element. Fans and artists equipped with AR glasses would be able to see virtual participants' avatars in the crowd as if they were there in person, over a live bidirectional feed that lets both the physical and virtual audiences share the same moment. As MIT Reality Hack's Luke Porwol put it, the goal isn't better production quality so much as a convincing sense of presence — connecting remote viewers not just to the performers, but to the rest of the crowd.
Audio may be the harder problem to solve. SMPTE president Rich Welsh, a co-champion of the project, has argued that many existing immersive experiences fail to feel real because audio hasn't kept pace with advances in visual tech — which is why Shure and King's College London are focused specifically on spatial audio fidelity rather than video.
For festivals like Montreux, already streaming dozens of concerts free on YouTube each year, IFeL points toward a next phase: not just wider distribution, but a livestream product remote fans might choose over a ticket — or at least stop thinking of as a lesser substitute for one.
