Preparing for the Stay-at-Home Glastonbury

I have always loved my annual Glastonbury-at-home experience and control it thoughtfully, from the Saturday night party guestlist to the ventilation (windows and backdoor open, even if it rains). So I was delighted when it was announced last year that the BBC was extending live rolling coverage from Glastonbury via 6 Music. Now, not only would I get a much more immersive experience of my favourite live music extravaganza but I'd also be able to help shape some of the interactive content we could provide from Pilton.

As my colleague Paul Rodgers outlines in his blog post the radio production team took on the challenge to provide the listening audience with the full Glastonbury experience and produced a staggering 39 hours of programming covering all aspects of the festival. The challenge for 6 Music's smaller but no-less perfectly formed interactive team was to find ways to reflect this sense of continuous output online. We opted to do two simple things - provide an accessible window on the station by broadcasting a live video stream from the 6 Music studio and aggregate the Twitter updates from our roving reporters and DJs on site.

At first, I think it's fair to say that most of our presenters were ambivalent about the cameras in the studio. But fabulous creatives that they are, by the second day into the long weekend, they'd found ways to use the camera to their advantage, mostly by improvising with what they found lying about in the van. So the studio white board became a canvas for Gid and Lammo to doodle on, and Adam and Joe turned some scrap cardboard into think bubbles to hold over their heads. You could see guests and contributors as they came in and out of the studio - I remember watching, captivated, as Emmy the Great and her guitar squeezed into the radio van to perform on Adam and Joe's Saturday show. We wondered if people watching were interested in seeing what else was going on so we set a small camera on the studio faders so people could watch the mechanics of radio in action.

This year we're taking what we learned and missed (including our very own 6 dressing up box) to bring 6 Music's experience of broadcasting live from Glastonbury direct to your laptop. The cameras will be back in the studio capturing and broadcasting our presenters and guests on air and hopefully coming up with some innovative ways to entertain our viewing listeners. We'll also send a camera out with our roving presenters so we can show you what they find, and for the first time, you'll be able to see many of the thousands of comments we receive via text, Twitter, Facebook and email alongside the pictures.

All our shows will be available to listen to again, including the rich array of archive programmes that are being broadcast overnight and we'll be providing shortcuts to all the best bits from the daily shows in handy clip form soon after broadcast.

I'm at home again this year, listening to non-stop Glasto from 6 Music and watching from my James Bond style set up of digital devices and consoles and would love to hear how everyone else plans to spend their Glasto-at-home.

Clare Hudson is the Interactive Editor of 6 Music and Radio 2

Related Posts

A Truly Interactive Glastonbury

The Glastonbury Advance Party

Glastonbury Takes Over 6 Music

Bringing Glastonbury to Television

• Keep up with all of the BBC's coverage on the Glastonbury home page.
• Follow @BBCGlasto on Twitter for news, retweets and links from the festival.
• We'll be scanning Twitter for use of the #BBCGlasto hashtag and publishing some of the tweets we find so use the hashtag when you're tweeting about the BBC's Glastonbury coverage.