Glastonbury Webcam Repair Mission
Post categories: Glastonbury
|17:31 UK time, Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Last week, a crack team from BBC Audio & Music Interactive travelled to Worthy Farm in Pilton to remount the stricken Glastonbury webcam and fill our lungs with clean country air/the stench of cow ordure.
As the content producer for BBC Online's coverage of major music festivals, I look after our events sites alongside senior producer Tim Clarke. "Major music festivals" translates as Radio 1's Big Weekend, Reading and Leeds, the Electric Proms and of course, Glastonbury.
Tim and I spend a lot of the summer in Portakabins with developers, picture editors, infrastructure teams and video producers. A large chunk of the 6th, 7th and 8th floors of our office back in London collaborate to bring the audience on-demand performance video, photo galleries, backstage performances and interviews.
Glastonbury is unique in the amount of pre-festival interest it generates. To reflect this, since 2007 we've had a webcam positioned on Worthy Farm. Mounted on farm's engine shed, it takes snapshots of three panoramic views of the site every minute. Throughout June, the webcam charts the site's transformation from working dairy farm into the UK's largest music festival.
The webcam currently shows the iconic Pyramid stage as a steel skeleton, part-clad in metal sheeting. Soon you'll see the sound rig loaded in and the site swarm with bands, crew and about 140,000 punters.
Or that's the plan anyway. The Glasto webcam has had a rather chequered history. A few days before 2007's festival, a farm vehicle took out the camera's connection to the router. In 2008, the webcam was up running from May until the first day of the festival when an electrical surge spectacularly took out the entire festival's site communications and fried the webcam in the process.
Although the webcam is invaluable in the run-up to the festival, ironically this year we won't be relying on it as we have some ambitious video streaming plans which will kick in during over the weekend of the festival 24-28 June. Stay tuned.
Until then, see what's happening on site with the Glastonbury webcam and keep visiting for the Glastonbury 2009 site which will launch next week.
Comment number 1.
At 19:01 8th Jun 2009, StuartQuinn wrote:The Flickr stream doesn't seem to be available this year. Is there any way to get at the archive of pictures? The photo stream is invaluable in seeing what has changed and makes the build up to the festival far more exciting!
Many Thanks
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Comment number 2.
At 11:03 9th Jun 2009, Nigel Smith wrote:Stuart
Unfortunately Flickr don't allow us to automate uploading stills from the webcam into a photostream.
We do realise that an archive is something people like so hopefully we'll have a new solution for next year.
Nigel (Senior Producer, BBC Music Interactive)
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Comment number 3.
At 09:04 22nd Jun 2009, Simmo42 wrote:Could I draw your attention to my YouTube videos, especially: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acOwyoaygLA made using your webcam...
Also, I'm impressed by how modern and well designed and constructed the Worthy Farm engine shed is. I wonder how they managed that ?
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Comment number 4.
At 19:19 8th Jul 2009, djbigrich wrote:how long will the webcam be up for-why not leave it on until next year-i love watching whats going on on the farm-sad but true-wot harm can it do
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Comment number 5.
At 17:07 30th May 2010, Buffystar wrote:Webcam is stuck at 1130am and also Jazzworld has John Peel Webcam on it
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