Due to Rob being an extreme tech geek, I've seen a lot of really 'cool' stuff being developed that unties the host from a central 'desk' location. I'm talking about using an iPad to manage rotation *and* manage the EQ and volume levels of a mixer wirelessly. Add a lapel mic to that and you can literally walk around the crowd adding singers to the list and involving the crowd directly with your banter. I was teching a karaoke show once with Maynard as host and something he did which I really really liked was after the song was sung, he'd find himself standing next to someone interesting and he'd pivot to them and do a little 'what did you think of that?' routine. Being able to run the show from a tablet or even a smartphone gives the host a huge amount of options. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the time these things are being developed without any input from hosts and so they rarely have that killer feature that takes it from being cool to play with and makes it a must have to use in the room. That goes for Tricerasoft's remote singer touchscreen input system that sounds great in theory but it doesn't solve the big issues of singer rotation and actually creates new ones. (If you have more than one person in the room with the same name, hilarity ensues).

I'm a firm believer that technology can dramatically improve karaoke for both the host and the singer and the fact that it hasn't really yet is only proof that the people driving the tech aren't trying to solve actual real world karaoke problems, they're just making 'cool' stuff.
Submitted by LeatherBaron on 27-09-2012

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