STREAMING THE STONES
More than 2.5 million people who watched The Rolling Stones play Glastonbury this year did not have a ticket to the festival. To get the chance to watch Jagger shake about the Pyramid stage in his shiny black suit like a 70-year-old eel out of water, millions of fans had to do little more than press the tiny red button on their remote control. The BBC’s digital coverage of this year’s festival attracted a record-breaking number of viewers with access to 250 hours worth of live festival footage streamed from all six stages over three days.
Since 1997 when the BBC first broadcast Glastonbury, the festival has become a national event each year snowballing more excitement than any other in the world, whether or not you can make it down on the day. People throw parties in their living rooms to watch Glastonbury live with friends; I remember dancing to Bruce Springsteen in my kitchen in 2009; MIDDLE 8’s Editor, Erin, went into labour watching Beyoncé shake her booty in 2011. It’s not just a British thing either, the hype has traveled worldwide and this year viewers as far afield as South Africa, Singapore and Colombia were added to the global guest list of people who could tune in and vicariously join the party at Worthy Farm.
This year over 400 BBC employees were involved in making sure all six stages would be seamlessly broadcast live to a television audience of 18 million with over 6 million of them using the digital services across Red Button, PC, Mobile and Tablets. Apart from the Eavis family who have signed some of the biggest acts in the world, the BBC are the ones responsible for drawing Glastonbury to the attention of the world since “The Year of the Mud” (1997). But the BBC were not the first ones to offer an entirely live stream. Thirteen years ago one man attempted this gigantic task with little more than a few cameras, a handful of ISDN lines and a lot of mud. In 2000 Paul Hitchman decided that people at home should be able to enjoy the party as it was happening too, so, using Apple’s predecessor Quicktime as a platform he got down to the festival to give it a go. “It was probably the first time a big major music festival like that anywhere had been web cast live, but the technology wasn’t really there to support it.” Hitchman admits.
"We had to string ISDN lines, physical ISDN lines, across the fields of Glastonbury from a central space to right across the fields to the stages. And I remember we tried to bury these lines a couple of inches underneath the ground but of course with the mud there were thousands of people churning it all up. I remember seeing tents being pitched over the lines and people having campfires and it was kind of crazy trying to keep the connection alive while we were trying to film and broadcast out to the world from these shaky little ISDN lines!"
While Hitchman may liken these early results to “a black and white silent movie compared to where we are now”, his efforts certainly drew the path that the BBC now take to a much bigger scale. Mark Friend is the BBC Controller across Multiplatform, Radio and Music and has been involved with broadcasting Glastonbury since 2007. One of Mark’s fondest festival memories actually goes back to a pre-televised Glastonbury when he was just a regular festivalgoer watching The Levellers headline in 1994. “My younger brother is the guitarist in the band”, says Mark proudly, “and it was the most incredible experience to have 300,000 people singing along and going crazy to his songs. That show was reputed to have been watched by the largest Glastonbury audience ever.”
For Mark, broadcasting Glastonbury to the rest of the world is not only about the headline acts, it’s also about helping promote lesser known musicians too. “Jake Bugg was special this year,” says Mark. “It was exciting to see him on the Pyramid stage. I've followed his journey since he appeared on the BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury several years ago. BBC Introducing focuses on new, under the radar artists and it's brilliant to see how far he's come and how quickly.” This year was the first year that the whole festival was made truly digital and pulling it off was no small feat:
"We brought together teams and technologies from across the BBC in a way that hadn’t really been tried before and certainly not at this scale for a live music event” says Mark. “Instead of doing all the work on site, we used the latest connectivity to get all the coverage back to a digital hub off-site in our London offices and then brought the necessary producers, editors, OB truck, compliance experts, bloggers and everyone else together there. We had an OB truck in car park with the editors for the red button live streaming output. We had people watching every single live feed and triggering on screen warnings and apologies where needed. We had other people editing video packages and photo galleries and publishing this on demand content quickly to all platforms. We positioned the social media team that would be live blogging, tweeting and sharing images and information right at the heart of the operation so that we could get real audience feedback straight away and respond accordingly."
The lengths the BBC have gone to means that this year every part of the festival could be streamed live to audiences. Many of those who applied for tickets missed out on being there but at least they could still watch it on their televisions, PCs, tablets, phones or listen to it over their radio, as it actually happened. I was one of those in the minority that were lucky enough to be at the festival when The Stones were playing the Saturday night, but I still watched the BBC’s coverage of the show on iPlayer when I got back home. Just to re-live it.