Snapchat’s “Our Story” Is A Genius, Collaborative Reinvention Of The Livestream

What does it feel like to be a massive music festival? Nothing like a glossy livestream of the mainstage. Much more like Snapchat’s new Our Story feature, a curated channel of user submitted photos of videos from all around a big event. I was there last night at Vegas’ Electric Daisy Carnival, an 140,000-person dance music festival where Snapchat piloted Our Story. I can vouch that the decentralized perspective was remarkably accurate. Our Story has huge potential, and you can follow along tonight by adding “EDC Live” on Snapchat.
The startup’s other big experiment at EDC didn’t fare so well.
See, cell phone networks get overloaded at every music festival. Wouldn’t it make sense for Verizon or AT&T or someone to set up extra towers or Wifi to help their customers or lure in competitor’s? Well Snapchat tried to beat them to it by providing free wifi for the mega-rave, but only for using the official EDC app and…Snapchat.
The idea was that while people’s texts, Instagrams, Facebook posts and tweets wouldn’t send, Snapchats would go through in an instant.
Unfortunately, it didn’t really work.

I tried more than 20 times across my 8 hours at the festival, and never successfully connected to the Snapchat Wifi networks. None of a dozen people I talked to were able to connect either and many festival goers expressed frustration about the experience on Twitter. It would have been very useful as few people’s mobile networks could handle the load and communication became nearly impossible. But worse than just resigning to being disconnected, many like me wasted battery and attention futilely trying to jack into Snapchat’s wifi.
Maybe that’s why Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel looked a bit hurried when I ran into him for a split-second in the EDC media center just before midnight. Snapchat had secured a nice partnership with the festival that promoted it in the official EDC app. Banners around the grounds advertised “No Signal? No Problem” and advised people to connect to Snapchat’s wifi. Some people must have gotten it to work, but the promotion seems to have attracted more users than the network could handle. Still, it was a valiant effort, and I hope Snapchat and other companies keep experimenting with the concept though it fell short at EDC night..

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