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February 2008 Digital Rapids’ StreamZ Empowers Major Event Webcasts for Streaming TankDigital Rapids StreamZ provided live encoding in the Windows Media and RealMedia formats with graphic overlays and simultaneous archiving, enabling the streams to be made available on the Stella Artois website within minutes of the live broadcast.
Download Festival
Streaming Tank is the leading provider of live webcasting. We are often asked to produce live streaming of concerts and tours and promotional events. (for example, The Who, Genesis, Little Man Tate, and Sandi Thom were recent clients) and were engaged by events company Live Nation to produce the live webcast from the Download Festival – a punk, thrash and heavy metal music festival – from Donnington race track in the UK.
This was the first time that this long-running festival (the largest of its kind in the world) had been broadcast live online. Live Nation wanted to use this event as an experiment, to gauge audience reaction to live webcasting. The website included a blog for each act, and was designed to be able to assess audience reaction, enabling organizers to determine whether the live webcast would be repeated in this way in the future.
 Streaming Tank produced the live webcast, taking feeds from the main screens on the centre stage, with video and audio acquisition and mixing provided by XLVideo. We were also responsible for the satellite connection, and distributing the encoded video streams over Akamai, one of the networks used by Streaming Tank as part of their massive Content Delivery Network offering.
Composite video feeds and unbalanced audio were encoded through StreamZ to Windows Media format, with viewers able to choose from multiple live streams. Once again, StreamZ was also used for adding graphic overlays. The StreamZ encoders operated non-stop for over 12 hours per day, for each of the three days. Over the three days of the festival, the live video was viewed by over 1.2 million viewers, with the highest number of simultaneous viewers tuning in to watch the performance by hard rock band Iron Maiden. With large audiences having seen the webcast, discovered new bands and bought music online from site links – plus tremendously favourable reaction from the blog sites – the live webcast was deemed a huge success and will be repeated next year.
The Digital Rapids Advantage
Streaming Tank has had a long relationship with Digital Rapids, and the Digital Rapids offerings have been going from strength to strength. Their encoders are robust and reliable, a winning combination that’s essential in the unforgiving world of live event webcasting.
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