Red Bee Media delivers Netherlands’ biggest ever livestream
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Faye Sutton
| 27 January 2021
Global media services company Red Bee Media is celebrating delivering the biggest livestream ever seen in the Netherlands.

VVAL 02 BartHeemskerk 1Music festival Vrienden van Amstel (Friends of Amstel, known as ‘the largest pub in the Netherlands’), which has been running for 23 years, was held as a digital event for the first time in its history on 16 January, with an estimated 1.7 million viewers from across 120 countries (based on 750,000 tickets sold and an average of 2.3 people per household).

Red Bee worked with Amstel, event agency Tribe Company and media production company FabriQ Media Group 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.

Tim Verhulsdonck, founder and managing partner, FabriQ Media Group, said: “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. 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.

Steve Nylund, CEO, Red Bee Media, commented: “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. 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.”