About Hellfest and b<>com
Hellfest is an annual summer rock festival held in the city of Clisson in the Pays de la Loire in France and is one of the largest metal and rock music festivals in Europe.
b<>com is a private French innovation center that pioneers, designs, and delivers technologies to companies that want to digitally boost their competitiveness. b<>com launched its spin-off company Obvios in 2023, specializing in the development of software-based private 5G network solutions.
“This project demonstrated how simple and effective it is to deploy and use a private 5G network for the production and distribution of multimedia content with the right tools like Haivison MoJoPro and Haivision StreamHub. Private 5G truly offers new perspectives that will revolutionize production and enhance user experience, and this is thanks to new mobile technologies offered by companies like Haivision.”
Valérie Le Ny
Formerly Pre-Sales Manager at b<>com, now at Obvios
The Challenge
Hellfest Productions looked to install a secure and reliable 5G cellular bonded IP connection to stream live coverage of Hellfest, a popular annual music festival held in Clisson, France. b<>com was seeking a way to provide robust high-performance bandwidth for live streaming over a private 5G network, avoid network congestion, and deliver high-quality video content to millions of worldwide viewers.
To achieve this, b<>com looked to deploy a secure, reliable, and quick-to-install connection, independent of public networks, to stream a live broadcast on the Hellfest Productions’ Twitch streaming platform. However, there were several obstacles in the way including transmission frequency with a high risk of interference and the limited power of the deployed radio equipment made it difficult to provide to penetrate certain metal infrastructures.
The Solution
To ensure live video streaming from the event which hosted thousands of attendees, b<>com deployed its private 5G *Dome* solution to broadcast live interviews on Hellfest’s Twitch channel. The infrastructure featured the Haivision MoJoPro app running on mobile devices for live broadcast contribution and Haivision StreamHub units to receive and distribute video.
Camera operators used their mobile devices to film the interviews and video was delivered to cloud instances of Haivision StreamHub to be decoded and distributed to local production via the SRT transport protocol.
The Result
The numbers reveal that this year’s edition of the festival was a massive success. The Hellfest 2023 Twitch channel featured four live broadcasts, each with an average of 4,000 viewers, reaching 11,700 at its peak. The broadcasts featured 28 live interviews, three times more than the 2022 edition, and garnered 1,000,000 total views – a 41% increase from two years ago.
