Lee Macaulay

Festivals: out the field, on your phone

#work, #bbc sounds, #bbc iplayer, #music, #glastonbury, #radio 2,

This summer, I was lucky enough to get to work with the team who manage the hefty task of making all of the music festivals that the BBC covers each spring and summer into something that BBC iPlayer and Sounds users get to enjoy live as the festival is happening, and then on-demand for the next month or so.

With the BBC having television coverage of five stages at Glastonbury this year along with two curated live streams, there’s a lot of preparation that goes into the weekend.

Surprisingly, a lot of it comes down to copying and pasting arcane codes and numbers into CMSes used for music event line-ups, updating spreadsheets for keeping track of the sheer amount of audio and video content coming into our HQ for the weekend (in an regular office, not a festival field) and making use of artwork templates so that everything looks consistent.

I was the Image Edit team lead for Glastonbury and you can see some of the photos we curated from across the event on the Glastonbury 2024 website.

For Radio 2 in the Park, I did a little bit of a few things but particularly contributed to keeping the Radio 2 in the Park website up-to-date and towards writing and curating articles about the weekend itself which later appeared on the BBC homepage.