Sonisphere Festivals
Project Overview
Kilimanjaro and AEG teamed up with K2 Agency to create Europe’s first touring rock festival brand – Sonisphere. Sonisphere is now in Poland, Turkey, France, Finland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Spain and the United Kingdom.
For the first time in its history, Kilimanjaro wanted the United Kingdom event to be live streamed from Knebworth.
To make this happen, Sonisphere teamed up with Streaming Tank to stream artists such as Slipknot, Motorhead, Parkway Drive, Mastodon, and Opeth.
Sonisphere needed live streams coming from both main stages streamed up to their main site and individual live streams for each artist on their own sites.
Solution
Management and Web Control
Prior to the event starting, Streaming Tank worked with Kilimanjaro on artist permissions to live stream. As each artist gave permission to live stream, Streaming Tank produced up embed code for their sites. This included server side countdown clocks to their performance.
This was set up so that only that artists live stream would be shown on their own site.
Encoder graphic overlays were also created for each act for both the main site and the artist sites.
For the main Sonisphere site, server side countdown control was put into place to indicate when the live streams would start.
Streaming Tank had two teams working during the event. One based up at the event location in Knebworth, and the other at BT Tower.
The Knebworth team worked alongside the event organisers, production teams, and satellite teams. They also controlled countdown clocks for each artists website.
The Streaming Tank team based at BT Tower controlled the encoders and graphical overlays for the encoders. They also managed the internet connectivity for the live stream at BT Tower.
Production
All of the production was handled by Blink TV. There was no cross over of artists on each stage, Blink switched the video and audio feed so Streaming Tank received one feed for encoding.
Satellite
The primary streaming sponsor was BT. Because of this, BT supplied a video satellite truck to Streaming Tank to send the mixed audio and video feed to a downlink connection at Madley in Herefordshire. This was then sent by fibre to BT Towe in Central London where it was picked up by the Streaming Tank encoding team.
Encoding
Streaming Tank deployed multiple hardware encoders for the event. This included primary and backup hardware encoders for the Sonisphere website live stream and another set of hardware encoders for the artists.
The artists encoders were set up with different stream names for each artist. This was linked to individual players (using the advanced Streaming Tank adaptive bandwidth players) to ensure once again that only the streams of each artist would appear on that artists website.
On Site Internet Connectivity
The internet connection for web control at Knebworth was provided by Event Geeks.
Result
The live streaming at the festival was a massive success; with hundreds of thousands of hits the message about the live stream went viral.
On the chat and bulletin boards around the festival, the complements rolled in.
Streaming Tank is currently organising next year’s festivals with the organisers.
