Advanced Television

Red Bee delivers Netherlands record livestream audience

January 25, 2021

Red Bee Media delivered the biggest livestream ever seen in the Netherlands, when Vrienden van Amstel (‘Friends of Amstel’) was held as a digital event for the first time in its 23-year-old history on January 16th.

Participation surpassed all expectations, with an estimated 1.7 million viewers from across 120 countries worldwide. Amstel, event agency Tribe Company and media production company FabriQ Media Group, relied on Red Bee to make sure the live event, with some of the country’s biggest artists, was delivered without interruption to audiences across the world. During headline act Armin van Buuren’s DJ set, the number of simultaneous streams peaked at 750,000.

Vrienden van Amstel, or “the largest pub in the Netherlands”, is one of the country’s biggest live music events, hosting around 150,000 attendees at the Ahoy Rotterdam arena every year. With Covid-19 restrictions in place, event agencies Tribe Company and FabriQ Media Group needed a partner who could provide a reliable livestreaming platform, capable of delivering hundreds of thousands of high-quality streams. Global media services company Red Bee Media was chosen to deliver the event through their managed OTT platform.

“When the largest pub in the Netherlands opens digitally for the first time, offering live entertainment from the biggest artists in country, you know that you can expect a lot of traffic on your platform”, says Tim Verhulsdonck, Founder and Managing Partner, FabriQ Media Group. “With 650,000 tickets sold upfront, there is absolutely no room for mistakes, and after collaborating with Red Bee on SemiFest Live, we knew they were the right partner to deliver a flawless livestream to homes across the Netherlands and the world. Throughout the whole event they maintained a steady hand, delivering high-quality streams with no hick-ups or interruptions.”

Red Bee was responsible for the end-to-end delivery of the livestream through the company’s managed OTT platform, including acquisition of the feeds, transcoding, user entitlement and delivery to the event website and white label applications.

“I’m very happy that we were given the opportunity to showcase the full capacity of our OTT services through such a large-scale event as Vrienden van Amstel”, says Steve Nylund, CEO, Red Bee Media. “The result truly shows the strength of our platform and our people, and we are looking forward to delivering many events like this throughout 2021 and beyond.”

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