Melbas among first takers,
FAST-EXPANDING music company Nightlife may be Brisbane-based but its success story started to play out in the early 1990s in Gold Coast nightclubs, where its video jukeboxes provided the soundtrack to wild parties and allnight raves.
Co-founder Tim de Souza, who started Nightlife in 1989 with husband and wife Mark and Vicki Brownlee, said he followed Mr Brownlee to Aus- tralia when his former schoolmate said he had an idea to develop video jukeboxes.
In the late 1980s, music videos were huge, with big-name artists such as Madonna, Prince and George Michael spending millions on elaborate productions.
Nightclubs would set up screen projectors to play the videos along with the music.
But the music was often out of sync with the videos.
Mr de Souza and Mr Brownlee came across a video jukebox at the Myer Centre in Brisbane and decided to create an improved version.
“This one had 30 clips on it and the audio was definitely not nightclub standard,” Mr de Souza said.
“So what we did was put 60 videos on two tapes.
“One video would be playing and the other could be searching, through a program we developed, for other songs to play. This meant we could do back-to-back videos all night long.”
He said they then found a way to tap into hi-fi audio sys-