Incoming Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation Chairman, John Sykes, revealed this week that the 2020 Induction Ceremony will be broadcast live on HBO. This will be the first time the event will be shown live since HBO took over broadcast duties in 2012.

Producing an awards show for a live audience is different than one that can be edited and broadcast later. The last eight ceremonies have each been four to five hours long, where inductees generally get an unlimited amount of time to speak. At the 2019 ceremony, many of the artists also performed four or five songs, knowing that not all of them would make the HBO version.

There are two different ways HBO could take the ceremony:

1. The ceremony could be streamed live on HBO Max, the new streaming service from AT&T’s WarnerMedia, which just happens to launch in the spring. In this case, the ceremony format could essentially remain unchanged, since fitting the event into a certain time window becomes far less critical. An edited version of the ceremony could still be created for regular HBO, just as it has been (although Sykes did say it would be live “instead of taped”).
2. The induction ceremony would be shown live on regular HBO and becomes a more traditional awards show like the Grammys, where the event is produced to fit a predetermined time frame (three hours?). In this case, performances would be far more limited and speech times would have to be carefully budgeted. The Rock Hall would be faced with even greater pressure than they are now to limit the number of inductees.

Given the nature of the streaming wars, we’re betting that HBO and the Rock Hall have the first option in mind, although with Sykes’s stated interest in “looking to do more in California,” that could suggest returning the induction ceremony to LA and going with a more traditional award show.

Prior to HBO’s involvement with the Rock Hall, the Fuse Network broadcast the ceremonies live on cable during their three year tenure. At the tail end of the VH1 Classic era, the 2007 and 2008 ceremonies were streamed live before airing later on TV. Given the intimacy of the Waldorf Astoria and the relatively limited audiences back then, the broadcasts didn’t seem to be overtly geared towards television. It will be fascinating to see how HBO treats it moving forward. We’ll be watching.