At a recent music festival hosted annually on the European island of Malta, held on July 16th at the historic Granaries in Floriana, featured performances from renowned artists DJ Snake, RAYE, and Nelly Furtado.
The Opportunity
The music event is one of Europe’s biggest free Summer festivals, with tens of thousands of fans making the trip for the 2024 edition. However, the global music media brand also needed to cater to audiences beyond the shores of the beautiful Maltese island.
To deliver the festival live to passionate music fans around the world, they decided to live stream the 2024 edition to multiple digital platforms, including major FAST service Pluto TV. This strategy would enable it to drive brand awareness for the festival, service a large audience and monetize its live content from the festival.
However, creating a production studio, capable of distributing high-quality live streams to multiple destinations and managing ad insertions, can be a costly and complex process.
The Workflow
With Grabyo’s advanced production capabilities, accessed via a browser, our client streamlined its production workflow and minimized the need for additional on-site crew and infrastructure within the event OB truck.
The production team ingested five SRT feeds into Grabyo Producer, our live production platform using Haivision Makito X encoders. These included pre-mixed feeds of the event, isolated camera views of the crowd and stage, frame rate converted feeds, and a backup feed delivered over Starlink satellite.
Ahead of the event, the production team mapped a StreamDeck device, using our agnostic support for hardware control surfaces, to control feed switching and activating graphic overlays.
The technical director switched between all of these sources to produce a packaged version of the show. This allowed the main show director and production team to focus just on the event itself.
To create an engaging experience for viewers at home, they utilized Grabyo’s new DVR markers feature for time-shifted playback. This feature allows for delayed playout of ISO recordings in a live production.
While the festival took place, a member of the production crew dropped event markers into the DVR recording of each ISO in our live clipping platform. The technical director was then able to select any of these markers to start playout, from that moment, in the live stream.
The ability to delay playout allowed the client to maintain the momentum of the show. Each time an act finished their set, instead of streaming an empty stage, they were able to cut forwards or backwards to another performance seamlessly.
To maintain the effect of moving through the festival in a linear fashion, the live stream began around 45 minutes after the festival began, giving it time to ‘jump forwards’ to the next performance in the recordings.
With planned distribution across Pluto TV, Facebook and YouTube, the client also had the opportunity to generate revenue from the Isle of Malta stream.
Using our SCTE-35 ad insertion feature, producers inserted ads at custom times throughout the show. Our ad insertion feature is compatible with all major playout platforms and supports server side ad insertion (SSAI), meaning they could manage all aspects of the broadcast within Grabyo Producer.
Remote producers based in New York also used the Grabyo clipping tool to build highlight clips of the event which were shared across the festival’s social pages, allowing for a quick turnaround during the event.
The Results
The broadcaster successfully delivered the event stream across multiple destinations and generated advertising revenue without investing heavily in equipment, infrastructure and a large on-site team, boosting ROI of the event itself, while being considerate of their carbon footprint.
This year’s event was a resounding success, with exceptional viewing figures and audience engagement, solidifying the event’s reputation as one of Europe’s premier free music festivals. The integration of Grabyo’s technology played a crucial role, highlighting the benefits of cloud video production in scaling the reach and revenue of live events.
