Video Edge magazine — August/September 2013
Live from Outside Lands: How Springboard Productions Streamed the San Francisco Music and Arts Festival

This summer’s Outside Lands music festival, held in August in San Francisco’s historic Golden Gate Park, was a big-ticket event, with acts ranging from Paul McCartney, Hall & Oates and Willie Nelson to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Now in its sixth year, the three-day festival saw 65,000 daily attendees, but music lovers around the world were able to get a taste of the spectacle — including McCartney’s epic three-hour set — via Ustream, which provided two free channels of live streaming and VOD content to any mobile phone, tablet, computer or Internet-connected TV.

San Francisco-based Ustream, recently ranked #343 on the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest Growing Private Companies in America, has not released numbers for Outside Lands, but for this year’s Bonnaroo festival the streaming company reported over 11 million viewers, including ad-driven syndication feeds, marking the event as one of the highest-viewed live-streamed festivals to date.

“Our main goal is to ensure that the quality is going to be up to par,” says Ustream sales engineer Gilad Gershoni, pointing to the viral nature of many musical events. “The biggest challenges are scalability, deploying our resources to handle both expected and unanticipated loads; and quality, optimizing our platform to ensure that viewers in a range of situations—mobile, tablets, computers, connected TVs with any size screen—have the best possible experience, even if at a lower bitrate.” (Read full story…)