CTV Has Neil Young Live From Canada Concert

CTV and Facebook, in partnership with Shakey Pictures, have announced a 90-minute concert by Neil Young on Dec. 1 that is tipped to be broadcast and streamed live from a small Ontario town that has a connection to Neil.

Earlier this month, Young posted on Facebook: “December 1st will be a big day for me. The Visitor will be coming to your town. I will be going to my town. You will be able to hear me and see me. My archive will open on that same day, a place you can visit and experience every song I have ever released in the highest quality your machine will allow. It’s the way it’s supposed to be. In the beginning, everything is free.”

Bell Media is rumoured to have several halls on hold for the Dec. 1 concert, but it appears that Young had let the cat out of the bag when he posted “I will be going to my town.” He grew up in in the small village of Omemee as a young lad with his father, sports columnist Scott Young.

The site is speculation at this point because no precise location has been given.

The acoustic concert is to be live-streamed on CTV.ca, an audio feed pushed through the iHeartRadio “Secret Sessions” podcasting utility, broadcast on the CTV network and available outside Canada on the Facebook platform, starting at 8 pm EST.

The Dec. 1 show date ties in with the release of his album, The Visitor, featuring Promise Of The Real, and an extensive collection of audio files spanning his career that include numerous out-takes, live sessions, and ephemera on the Neil Young Archives. The audio streams use a new coding system called XStream. Initially, access to the contents and the streams will be free of charge.

In a recent Facebook post, Young explains that XStream “plays at the highest quality your network condition allows at that moment and adapts as the network conditions change. It's a single high-resolution bit-perfect file that essentially compresses as needed to never stop playing."

The concert will be filmed and directed by well-known Hollywood actress turned documentarian, eco-activist and Young’s newfound girlfriend, Daryl Hannah.

— This story has been edited since the original posting at the behest of Bell Media.

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