Blackmagic Design equipment was used for the livestream at Reggae Land 2026, which welcomed a record-breaking 135,000 visitors to the National Bowl in Milton Keynes across its three-day expanded festival, with mainstage performances reaching a further 1.2m viewers via YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. Live production specialists dwmedia and oXyFire Media produced and delivered the livestreams, while PRG handled IMAG for the on-site audience, sharing cameras and signals as a combined production.
The coverage combined three Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K G2s in fixed positions front of house, at the drums and upstage, alongside PTZ cameras and drones for additional stage, audience and aerial coverage. Three URSA Broadcast G2 cameras were stationed front of house: one roving between pit and stage, one on a 24ft jib, and a long lens unit with a Canon UJ90 box lens at the back of the crowd. Camera sources were recorded in 4K 50p, with transported signals running at 1080p50.
A 24-core multicore fibre connection linked the two production areas, with Blackmagic Mini Converter Optical Fibre 12Gs providing the connection between the fibre infrastructure and SDI equipment. An ATEM Constellation 8K live production switcher sat central to the workflow for vision mixing, with PRG sharing a further nine feeds alongside dwmedia and oXyFire’s nine camera positions. Eight HyperDeck Extreme 8K HDR recorders captured the programme and ISO sources using their four-channel recording capability, with a Blackmagic Cloud Store Mini 16TB providing network storage.
Tally integration required particular coordination, as PRG was using Tallyman while oXyFire needed to return tally information through its own workflow. The team developed a solution using the upstream keying functionality on the ATEM Constellation alongside a wireless LoRa tally system, providing around 1.5km of line-of-sight range with tally delay of less than half a second.
Jay Rozanski, producer at oXyFire, said: “I’m a bit of a redundancy freak. The livestream used a Haivision bonded encoder, with two Starlink terminals providing independent backup paths alongside the primary site connection. The same principle was applied to cameras, with a spare body kept rigged and ready backstage if required.”
Daniel Wilkinson, founder at dwmedia, added: “We needed to make the livestream feel like an extension of being at Reggae Land, rather than only documenting the performances. As well as the main artists, we wanted to capture audience reactions, atmosphere and the overall scale of the festival for a micro-macro feel.”
Rozanski added: “The B4, EF and PL lens compatibility, alongside talkback and camera control, were useful features for configuring the cameras across the different positions and matching the look of the cameras being used by PRG.”
You can subscribe to Installation magazine for free here and the daily newsletter here.
