(CelebrityAccess) — Organizers for the Glastonbury were forced to make a ticketed live stream for the virtual edition of the music festival free to watch over the weekend after paying fans ran into technical problems that prevented them from watching the premium stream.
According to a statement from the festival, fans who paid £20 to access the virtual Live At Worthy Farm concert on Saturday reported experiencing technical issues which prevented them from accessing the performance.
After issues with the stream persisted for two hours, Glastonbury organizers launched a free stream, allowing fans to tune in without payment.
“I am so sorry about the problems,” said festival organizer Emily Eavis in a social media post.
However, the free stream had technical limitations of its own and was only able to be rewound for an hour, meaning that some paying fans missed a substantial chunk of the online festival’s opening set.
Eavis said that the whole film will be made available for viewing to ticket buyers for the next week.
“I really hope you can enjoy the rest of it tonight. And again, I’m just so sorry to anyone who’s had issues,” she said.
Following the livestream fumble, Glastonbury’s streaming partner Driift issued a statement:
UPDATED STATEMENT AND AN APOLOGY
Dear Live At Worthy Farm ticket purchasers,
We are standing here today with the heaviest of hearts. Although many thousands of you were able to stream the event as planned last night, we are mortified that technical issues meant that many others were effectively locked out for up to two hours and unable to use your access codes.
This was unacceptable.
Driift is not a tech business or a media platform, and we rely on a third party company for certain aspects of protecting the stream. This provider has now identified the cause of last night’s problems, and, although we are awaiting a full technical report, there were no subsequent issues for ticket buyers accessing later streams for North America or Australia.
We are assured that there will be no problems with today’s two “encore” streams which will continue as planned at 2pm BST and 7pm BST.
Those ticket purchasers adversely impacted last night have already been emailed with instructions of how to access these streams – or how to process a refund. Meanwhile, those who purchased tickets for the “encore” streams specifically should proceed and log-in as normal.
Driift was established as a producer and promoter of livestream events at the height of last year’s lockdown, with the goal of getting artists, crews and venues back to work and do inspiring things with an exciting new format.
For last night’s failings, we would like to apologise to Glastonbury Festival, to all the amazing artists who gave their time to perform, and to all the backstage crew and partners who worked so hard with us over many months to make this historic show a reality.
Most importantly, we apologise unreservedly to all of you who had your plans upset.
We would also like to make clear that Driift is making no financial gain from this livestream event, and we hoped it would generate much needed revenue for the Festival and its charity partners.
In that spirit, we sincerely hope that those who encountered problems will take the opportunity to watch and enjoy the event today, and that many more will buy tickets to support the Festival and its three associated charities.
We still believe that this is a very special film, and it is beyond frustrating that so many of you could not enjoy it as we intended.
