V Festival 2011
Project Overview
Live video streaming specialists, Streaming Tank, where asked by the promoters of V Festival, Metropolis Music, to live stream over 20 hours of live festival content from the two day festival from their three main stages.
V Festival is an annual music festival held at two locations simultaneously in England during August. Artists literally swap locations over night. V Festival, now in its 16th year started streaming in 2010. For the 2011 festival, Metropolis Music wanted to do what they did in 2010, but better. Streaming Tank were brought in to make it all happen.
Solution
Streaming Locations
The live stream was to be streamed live to the V Festival home page, the V Festival Facebook page, various label and artist websites, as well as two television broadcasters websites, Channel 4 and T4.
Multiple Stages
Streaming Tank live streamed simultaneously and independently from the three main stages enabling viewers to pick and choose which stage they wanted to watch and when. Additional backstage and interview content was then mixed into each live stage feed between artist sets, creating a far greater experience of the festival ,as well as increasing advertising and promotion opportunities.
Player Design and Embedding
Streaming Tank developed a bespoke player for the festival, designing custom animated buttons for each stage, in keeping with the V Festival quirky look and feel. The player was then tailored to suit each additional 3rd party website that it was embedded into.
Geo-targeting
The live streams were geo-targeted for United Kingdom only in accordance to the requests from the labels, artists, and broadcasters. Server clusters where established to handle the large number of stream requests, check the IPs and provide additional security checks to ensure that only the UK viewers could watch the stream. If users from outside the UK tried to watch the stream then they were presented with a tailored message.
Production
Live performance production from each stage was managed by Blink TV productions. Video and Audio feeds where sent to the Streaming Tank HQ behind main stage. Streaming Tank provided an additional production team for each stage, which would handle the addition of recorded content and video advertising into the live stream for each stage, creating a continuous production schedule for 10 hours each day.
Compliance
As the streams were being viewed on Broadcast channel websites, and therefore had strict legal requirements for associated live content, Streaming Tank managed a compliance team for each stage.
Each stage had a compliance team who would bleep out any verbal or visual profanity. Each operator had a 2 second window to decide on the severity of the offense, and whether it was the audio, video or both that needed to be removed. Generic crowd shots and birds tweeting noises were used in place.
Recording
Streaming Tank provided a post-compliance recording of the event, totaling around 20 hours of live content captured.
Encoding
Streaming Tank provided primary and backup hardware encoders for each stage. This included multiple qualities that were detected by the player bandwidth detection enabling each user to view the content at the highest level that their internet connection could handle, whilst managing the events bandwidth usage.
On Site Internet Connectivity
Streaming Tank worked alongside CSA to provide the connectivity for the Streaming and for the production teams. Unlike most festivals that Streaming Tank are involved in, CSA organised a massive internet connection from a true Gigabyte connection made available for the site.
Content Delivery
All content was delivered through Akamai, using its 87,000 servers spread across 72 countries within 1,400 data centres. This guaranteed 100% uptime for each user.
Pre-Roll Advertising
As each user clicked on each stage, they were presented with a pre-roll advertisement. This was hard coded into the player but delivered through the CDN via an ad-delivery network for accurate statistics. Each pre-roll advert was clickable, with the controls de-activated to ensure maximum exposure for the sponsoring brands.
Banner Advertising
Streaming Tank set up a dynamic banner delivery system that was controlled on the ground but delivered through an ad-network for accurate statistics. Streaming Tank could control which banner was delivered, when, and on which stage.
Statistics
It was essential for accurate statistics of the event to be provided for both video and advertising usage during the 2 day festival. This included being able to distinguish not only between stages, but also between the various websites that the player was embedded on.
Statistics where given including hits, unique visitors, average length of view, viewer qualities, live and on-demand, number of pre-roll adverts, number of banner adverts, click through rates etc.
Result
This was a hugely successful live stream for both the organisers and the 3rd parties that the stream was sent to, as well as the advertisers and sponsors. The event made use of many of the Streaming Tank’s services to great affect winning Streaming Tank recognition throughout the industry as the leading live video streaming company for the music and festival industry.
