The summer music festival season is in full swing. In San Francisco, that
means the three-day Outside Lands music festival, which this year featured the
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, Vampire Weekend, and Paul McCartney.
The festival packed in 65,000 people a day. But those who didn't want to
shell out the $250 for a 3-day pass, wait in line at the Porta Potties, or spend
hours staking out a spot of grass by the main stage could still see the big
names acts -- and for free.
Festival organizers partnered with live streaming platform Ustream to
provide a free, live webcast that could be viewed worldwide on desktops, laptops
and mobile devices.
"We have a multi-stage webcast. People will be able to watch, just like
they're here at the festival, be able to watch from home," explained festival
organizer Rick Farman, co-founder of Superfly Presents. "It's a sold out event
this year, so we're happy that a lot of people who just can't come out or buy
tickets can be able to get some experience of the festival."
The live Webcast from Ustream and Springboard Production involved feeds
from cameras placed on the three largest stages, three video production trucks,
hundreds of feet of cable, and a production team of more than 150 people.
"Typically festivals would broadcast the same footage they would show to
the left and right of the stage. In this situation, we're taking multiple camera
feeds, multiple audio signals, mixing it all specifically for the web
broadcast," Ustream senior sales engineer Gilad Gershoni said.
Festival-goers could also tap into the live stream on their mobile devices
if they could get a strong enough cell signal. In an effort to stem customer
complaints about spotty cell coverage at big events, AT&T and Verizon put up
mobile cell towers called COWs or Cell on Wheels, more than doubling what they
provided last year. AT&T's setup included something called a mega-COW, which
was the largest COW they ever deployed in Northern California and accounted for
about 50 percent of the overall equipment AT&T deployed.
Several times at the festival it took awhile to load the Ustream Outside
Lands page and access the streams on my Verizon iPhone 5. However, I was able to
easily pull up the livestream of the Phoenix performance on my phone while I was
watching Nine Inch Nails on the main stage -- so it did pass that test.
Expect to see more music festivals streamed live for free. With about 11
million people tuning into Ustream's broadcast of the Bonnaroo music festival,
concert promoters see the live Webcasts as a way to give viewers at home a taste
of that they're missing and hopefully inspires them to pay for tickets in the
future.
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