Audiences go Gaga over BBC's online Glastonbury coverage

by Dan Leahul, revolutionmagazine.com 09-Jul-09, 14:55

LONDON - Record numbers of people watched this year's Glastonbury Festival on-demand through the BBC Glastonbury website or the BBC Red Button, with American pop star Lady Gaga proving the biggest single attraction.

The BBC's festival website, which offered highlights of more than 60 acts playing the main stages, received 7.2 million video requests, with Lady Gaga's performance proving the biggest draw with 1.3 million requests followed by Lily Allen with 762,000 and Blur with 538,000 requests.

This is a four-fold increase on 2008, where the top artist was last year's headliner Jay Z, with 119,000 requests.

On Saturday 27 June, the website peaked at 229,000 daily unique users, exceeding the peak of 175,000 daily unique users from 2008, and in the week following the festival the website had 437,000 unique users (from 326,000 last year).

And, following the success of BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend on the red button, the new Glastonbury figures show that record audiences pressed red to watch exclusive and additional coverage of the festival.

More than 6.1 million viewers watched the red button coverage over the three-day event making it the most popular music event ever shown on the BBC's red button.

New additions to this year's coverage included three webcams placed around the site, which provided audiences with a choice of live streaming footage from various locations including the Pyramid stage, the BBC 6 Music studio and an overview of the park area of the site.

Audiences were able to select which cameras they watched giving them access to the main stage area and performances from the 6 Music studio.

Mark Friend, BBC's audio and music controller, said: "I'm delighted with these figures and very proud of what we've delivered this year.

"We are seeing an amazing reaction from our audience to the multiplatform approach that we are pursuing, especially the demand for video.

"We wanted to make sure our audiences could enjoy the festival even if they weren't there and catch up with their favourite acts when it suited them."