Streaming Tuesday, October 6 from 2-7pm on GBH Twitch and 3-7pm on GBH YouTube and Facebook
Join Chat Plays GBH and step inside your favorite GBH shows! From asking the questions in a NOVA AMA, to being an appraiser on Antiques Roadshow, to choosing your own Arth-venture, Chat Plays GBH is a live, interactive experience where you can not only watch the shows you love but also play along and produce them. Produced in collaboration with Hovercast, Chat Plays GBH is an innovative digital event to showcase the different forms of interactive live streaming, an emerging genre of media that melds television, social media and gaming into an engaging experience allowing audiences to participate in their entertainment.
Structured like an old-fashioned variety show, the stream is comprised of five roughly one-hour segments featuring GBH shows, including NOVA, Antiques Roadshow, Arthur and Joyce Chen Cooks. Streamed remotely over the course of one afternoon, the show demonstrates increasing levels of interactivity, from simple interview questions, to choose your own adventure, to full co-creation. The stream is preceded by public media trivia questions viewers can answer in chat.
The interactive livestream kicks off with AMAzing Space with NOVA, a Twitch-exclusive event inspired by GBH’s popular prime time science series NOVA and an homage to Reddit’s popular “Ask Me Anything” subreddit. Audience members will have the opportunity to pose questions to two scientists about the intersection of exotic biosignatures and world-building — Clara Sousa-Silva, an MIT astrochemist who co-authored the recent study finding phosphine on Venus and Moiya McTier an astrophysicist, folklorist, and science communicator currently pursuing a PHD at Columbia University.
The segment Antiques RoadShowdown transforms the long-running GBH program Antiques Roadshow into a cross-platform online game show. Hosted by the show’s executive producer, Marsha Bemko, audience members will guess the price of items and receive points for playing along.
In Choose Your Own Arthventure, the audience will assemble a new episode of the longest-running children’s animated series in the US, GBH’s Arthur. Hosted by Deborah Frank, associate producer of Arthur, the audience will build the story by voting to select popular clips of the animated aardvark’s adventures.
The first known example of cross platform crowdplay between YouTube and Twitch is on display in Stream Cuisine with Joyce Chen, a segment inspired by the classic GBH culinary education show Joyce Chen Cooks. Viewers on each platform control their own chef, providing instructions in chat as chefs create Joyce Chen’s iconic Sweet and Sour Pork recipe. Stephen Chen, Joyce’s son, will determine the winner based on taste, presentation and accuracy.
Chat Plays GBH culminates with Chatsterpiece, in which the live audience has its greatest role yet: co-authoring a generic British drama acted out by Boston-based improv artists, GC Entertainment. Hosted by GBH Drama Club's Jackie Bruleigh, the segment celebrates the popular modern adaptations of classic literature found on public television.
Learn more about the GBH Emerging Platforms team behind GBH Chat Plays.