04.09.2018

Streaming the Tomorrowland vibes globally

A project by Freecaster, a BCE subsidiary.

Live video streaming and distribution by Freecaster

Tomorrowland selected Freecaster (a BCE partner) for live streaming its 2018 festival on the international scene. 11 million views later the festival was another success on-site and online.

Freecaster masters the entire value chain from video production to online delivery worldwide thanks to a proprietary Online Video Platform.

The customer was looking for a partner with the technical capabilities to ensure the online viewing of the festival. Freecaster Online Video Platform was the perfect solution, having almost unlimited bandwidth worldwide. For the third year in a row, working intensively with CenturyLink, Freecaster was able to answer Tomorrowland expectations, coping with sudden volume rise.

In addition, to ensure a rich online streaming experience, Freecaster developed a multi-stream video player, which was allowing viewers to select their own stage an enjoy the experience on any screen. The player was also featuring the names of live and next DJ’s in a dedicated overlay layer, giving full control to what viewers wanted to watch.

This dual expertise was the premise of the strong collaboration between Freecaster and Tomorrowland.

Seamless live streaming

Linked to Freecaster private Cloud, the platform ensured the online streaming to Tomorrowland network, website, app and partners. Freecaster gathered up to eleven video feeds for live streaming, including the five simultaneous feeds to enhance the final video experience.

The platform was supervised over two weekends during the complete show and embarks a monitoring system in Freecaster private Cloud. This interface gives a precise overview for the monitoring engineers but can also be accessed by Freecaster on a global scale. This flexibility ensures the continuity of their services and therefore seamless customer experience.

The private Cloud interface of Freecaster also monitors the traffic of the video player (impressions, unique visitors, countries, audience, etc).

The use of multiple CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) allows the multiplication of the viewers. Targeting global reach, including China, Tomorrowland attracted more than 400 000 festival participants on-site and reached 11 millions views online in 2018.

The live stream was also available for online radio. Freecaster was delivering five radio relays streamed on selected internet radios. To ensure maximum reach, the main playback URL was distributed publicly allowing social network sharing and audience multiplication.

Copyright Tomorrowland

Advanced live video player

Tomorrowland music festival offers multiple experience with numerous live sets. It was paramount to convey this experience to the online community.

To do so Freecaster live video player has evolved through the years offering new features to enhance the user experience. From a seamless high-quality video player it integrated last years the ability to switch live from one stage to the other with almost no delay.

The innovation of Freecaster live video player resides in the fact that all the features are inside the player. It is not an HTML page with buttons to access extra content, everything is inside the player, allowing the user to switch from one content to the other without leaving fullscreen mode or viewing mode on a smartphone. The different sets appear in thumbnails inside the player.

“The target of our customer was to spread the festival experience to the electronic community with the opportunity to follow live the main scenes of the festival and experience the thrill of Tomorrowland,” explains Ray Dulieu, CEO and founder at Freecaster. “The new version of our video player, with the multi-stream features, allows live streaming, live switch from one stage to the other and even having a clear view on what is coming next.”

On the webpages the player features localised advertising. This feature allows the different countries to insert their adverts in the preroll of the stream. Once the player is triggered, it stays on the screen, in a smaller mode. While this feature is quite common, the advanced live set switch stays active through the different viewing size.

“We are always impressed by the amazing success of this event and we are glad to contribute to the development of their footprint on a global scale. Our recent player developments gave a new online dimension and rose up the viewing time of the DJ sets,” concludes Baptiste Fosséprez, Chief Development Officer at Freecaster.