A strange thing happened last year. In my despicable-but-traditional Best of 2013 run-down I ended up wanting to include quite a few things that I hadn't actually left the house to see. Some were shows from the Royal Court's excellent Surprise Theatre strand (Nick Gill's Sand, a smith's Commonwealth, and Martin Crimp's In the Valley), all of which were streamed live online.

Before these, there was the incredible event that was Forced Entertainment's 24-hour marathon durational performance of Quizoola live-streamed from the Barbican. It's not an exaggeration to say that the experience of watching Quizoola changed the whole way I think about "live" performance. In the show, two performers sit in two chairs; one has a thick ream on paper with questions printed on it, and the other performer has to answer those questions. It sounds ludicrously simple, but turns out to be mind-blowing, banal, moving, hilarious and everything in between.

Thanks to advances in technology, a whole new relationship between theatres and audiences is now possible. Granted, it feels new largely because the BBC stopped filming theatre performances (or making cheap TV movies of stage productions) around the end of the 70s. Look Back in Anger, for example, made its reputation not because of Kenneth Tynan's celebrated review, or because a lot of people saw it in the theatre, but because an extract was shown on telly. Nevertheless, the rise of online broadcasting is certainly a huge shift for theatre as an artform.

Back in January, Lyn Gardner argued that live-streaming projects such as the National Theatre's cinema-based NT Live don't deter anyone from going to see live performances – and her thinking is now backed up by new research. That said, a follow-up piece by Elizabeth Freestone did point out some unhappy, unforeseen consequences on regional touring for smaller companies, many of which have not been resolved.

More recently, Michael Billington wrote about the screen version of Richard Eyre's Almeida production of Ibsen's Ghosts: "I can only say that it offered an experience comparable to that I had in the theatre." I would disagree with him that screen and stage are comparable. That's not to say that one is better than the other, but I do think the two experiences are poles apart – certainly as currently practised. However, I would also argue that there's a world of difference between the NT Live model, which at least reproduces other factors of theatre – having to leave the house, sit in a room with other people and be quiet – and live-streaming online. During Quizoola I variously smoked indoors, slept, tweeted with other people watching around the world, and took loo breaks whenever I fancied – and didn't affect the experience of anyone else watching one iota by doing so.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing, though, and something that came through much more strongly in a subsequent Forced Entertainment Live-Stream, And On The Thousandth Night, was the community that grew up around the event. It was shorter than Quizoola (a mere six hours!), but during that epic, hallucinogenic period, Exeunt magazine offered a Durational Criticism blog, and Twitter was ablaze with the online audience exclaiming, laughing together and repeating great lines to each other. For six hours it felt like we were very much a community.

Fast-forward to last week, when, on Thursday and Friday, the experimental performance/games company Coney staged (if that's still the word) their new project, Better Than Life. The live premise is simple: you arrive at the "secret location", take part in a bit of audience participation and then meet Gavin, a man who has been granted the power to draw pictures of future events (a plot wittingly or unwittingly lifted from the wonky US science fiction TV show Heroes). The online premise is more complex: Coney's stated aim is to experiment with how they might be able to let people interact with the performance even if they are not physically present. To this end, online viewers could choose which camera they watched from, interact in the site's own chat facility and even control spotlights in the room itself.

And despite the odd technological hiccup, the hour's viewing provided intriguing glimpses of a number of possible futures. Of course, Coney made things harder for themselves by essentially crash-testing an entirely new platform at the same time as devising a completely new show. Perhaps developing this technology around an existing piece – their immensely popular A Small Town Anywhere, for example – might have been a better first step.

Obviously interactive theatre is different to a sit-down performance in somewhere like the Barbican (which, if I'm honest, is probably still my preference), but nonetheless, the idea that the passive viewer may very soon be handed the keys to the editing suite and be able to call their own shots is a seductive vision indeed.