Eric Janssen is Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of global cashless payment, access control, and brand amplification company, Intellitix. In this article, Eric explores how digital is revolutionising live events. Event organisers all over the world are ditching physical cash and concession tokens onsite and adopting more efficient cashless payment systems. From Oyster Cards to mobile payments, the cashless revolution has truly begun. Digital experiences and live events go hand in hand, and with the peak of festival season upon us, we’ve seen a true shift in the adoption of new technology at some of the summer’s largest events. Many of…
Author: Festival Insights
UK: Mojo Barriers has continued to expand its work with independent festivals by securing a new contract win for this year’s BoomTown Fair, set to take place from August 13 – 16. BoomTown Fair has called upon Mojo Barriers to design and deliver its trusted stage barriers for this year’s festival, which will take place at Matterley Estate in Hampshire. Mojo Barriers has been contracted to supply 450 metres of stage barrier, 200 metres of bar barrier, and 13 line-up gates across the whole festival site. Set in its own unique, fantasy festival town, Boomtown boasts nine different districts with…
AUSTRALIA: This year’s Splendour in the Grass festival in Byron Bay, close to the famous Gold Coast, hosted a significant number of SGM’s market leading outdoor lighting fixtures. With damp experiences from the past haunting festival organisers and production managers, the requirement for lighting that could withstand torrential winter rainfall was the highest of priorities. And Mother Nature did not disappoint! The four day event saw SGM lighting fixtures such as the P-5 RGBW wash and the Q-7 RGBW flood take part in several installs and stage packages across the festival. A most notable display being that of Melbourne artist…
EUROPE: Ticketscript has become the first self-service ticketing provider in Europe that enable tickets to be stored through Google Now. Tickets purchased via Ticketscript from today will be able to find all event details and ticket(s) within the Google Now app. Users will even get an automatic reminder on the day of the event. Ruben van den Heuvel, Head of Product, says “this new and unique feature makes it even easier for our ticket buyers to save their tickets, especially not to lose them. We are very pleased that we have developed this together with Google” Once at the event,…
UK: Attendees were excited about Camp Bestival once again this year, and Showsec has received recognition for their part in the occasion, even from many of the children who revelled in all the fun at Lulworth Castle. The award-winning family festival enhanced its proud reputation with four days of the very best in music and entertainment in picturesque surroundings close to Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, made all the more enjoyable by the warm, sunny weather. It left organisers hailing it as the best-ever Camp Bestival and those who made the annual pilgrimage to Lulworth Castle were in full agreement. The theme…
SPAIN: Way back in 1995, the bosses at BBC Radio One gave the go ahead to what would become a legendary yearly pilgrimage to the summer dance capital that is Ibiza. Starting out with a 120-minute single set broadcast live at 2am from then dance DJ Nicky Holloway, to full on 24/7 week long streaming extravaganza, the BBC has been reporting from and backing dance culture on the ‘White Isle’ ever since. With this summer being the 20th anniversary of its initial live broadcast from what was then Manumission (now known as Privilege), the venue may have changed many times,…
UK: Interest surrounding Avolites’ newest lighting console, the live control focused Arena, has been gathering momentum after a number of festival appearances, including at Somerset House’s Summer Series for acts including Angus & Julia Stone. Set in one of London’s most iconic landmarks, Summer Series featured a diverse and impressive line-up of headline artists alongside hotly tipped emerging acts. As house desk for the 11-day series of performances, Arena was used by the likes of folk duo Angus & Julia Stone LD Toby Hoggarth, while George Ezra, lit by John Barker, also employed an Avolites set-up. The Arena combines the…
UK: Launched in 2004 as an alternative to the established mainstream music festivals, Secret Garden Party is about music, people, places, and stories coming together in the most hedonistic, magical, and out-of-this world experience one could ever hope for. Originally created by Freddie Fellowes on his family’s 6000-acre farm in Huntingdon, the festival has grown from a single stage, with a few thousand people, to around 32,000 spread over at least 15 stages. This eclectic music and arts event surrounds a river and a lake (bearing a different eye popping sculpture each year) — and this year featured for the…
USA: Elation Professional’s new EPT6IP high-resolution LED display panels played a key role at NY CityFest with Luis Palau, a free outdoor concert held July 11 on the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park. Boston-based rental and production company Audio Spectrum provided all of the LED video screens and staging for the event, some 280 EPT6IP panels in all, some of which were sub-rented from Elation dealer Gemini Light, Sound & Video. Lighting design for the event was by Gordon Painter and Kevin Shaw. The Elation EPT6IP panels were used for large stage wing portrait walls on each side…
UK: Following a successful event at last year’s festival, XL Video, working with Technical Producer, Nick Diacre, has once again produced a significant achievement in 180˚ live mapping for Shangri-La’s Heaven Stage at the Glastonbury festival 2015. The Heaven structure was built organically by Andrew Cross and his team, onsite at the festival, only a few days before the event, and the construction is different every year. The wide, wooden structure consists of 419 tessellated triangles, which were mapped using photogrammetry and stitched into two composites – one a 2D map and a second 3D model. XL’s…