Building a digital library for streamed concerts using Spektrix

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra have been dazzlingly successful at producing high quality digital concerts for a growing online audience.

Over the summer of 2020 we worked with their team to set up a digital paywall, using Spektrix. During the first six months of their ensuing live-streamed season, the BSO sold 38,000 digital tickets to audiences around the world, increasing their audience by almost 30% during that time. Their digital concerts have been so successful that they have been showcased by the UK government at a meeting of G7 ministers, as an example of best practice.

The BSO in full swing

We’re very proud of the website we designed and built for BSO in 2019, but as their digital concerts continued to go from strength to strength it became clear that there were aspects of their pre-pandemic site that could be improved to match their new concert format.

Live-stream literate audiences

The success of BSO’s digital concerts had brought new online audiences to the orchestra. It also made their existing audiences more familiar with the experience of watching concerts online in this way.

The BSO team wanted to build on the digital experience for these live-stream literate audiences. They were keen to create a more complete experience, with a mixture of free and paid content that would encourage users to set up digital accounts with the BSO.

Re-watching events

If you haven’t watched a BSO digital live-stream, you’re missing out.

The BSO work with a roster of some of the UK’s leading broadcasters, to present the events. The concerts are skilfully filmed and have great audio quality. And the music itself is, of course, sublime.

The concerts are broadcast live, but digital audiences are able to re-watch concerts on-demand after the event.

The BSO’s pre-pandemic website was great at promoting the live events themselves. But it hadn’t been designed to accommodate on-demand events. So once live-streamed events ended, they moved into a separate feed, which was quite hard for digital audiences to find. There was definitely a cleaner solution.

The digital library

The need for a cleaner solution to host on-demand events on the website, coupled with a desire to improve the digital experience for live-stream audiences, led to the creation of a new digital library.

We created a bespoke page, accessed via the secondary navigation, which contains a customer’s personalised digital library.

The BSO digital library page can be accessed via the secondary navigation.

If the customer doesn’t have an account with the BSO, they are encouraged to create one here. If they do and they’re logged in, they have access to a personalised digital library of all of the on-demand recordings of concerts they have access to.

The personalised ‘My concerts’ section of the digital library.

The digital library offers exclusive content to BSO members and supports. The available titles are displayed, whether the user is a member or not, to incentivise them to sign up.

Exclusive content in the ‘Members and Supporters’ section.

And it also features a variety of additional free content, curated by the BSO team.

A selection of free to watch content.

As part of the library we also redesigned the live-stream events page on the BSO site, featuring a larger video player as the central component of the page.

A personalised experience

We were able to personalise the paid content the customer has access to by pulling through information about a customer’s tags on Spektrix.

A personalised experience on a website is something we often talk to clients about when we’re creating new sites. Personalised experiences can make audiences feel welcome, they can help them reach the content they’re interested in as quickly as possible, and they can help incentivise people to buy tickets.

Often, one of the stumbling blocks that makes personalised experiences harder to introduce, is the challenge of incentivising a website visitor to log in to an account. The BSO’s digital library is a great example of the kind of incentives that can be offered to new and returning customers, to encourage them to log in.

the potential of personalisation

Sarah Caswell from Spektrix USA, talking to us about accessibility.

Spektrix’s tags are a fantastic tool. We recently chatted to Sarah Caswell from Spektrix USA, who told us about the ways that tags can be used to make venues more accessible. We’ve also spoken to Andrew Kilroy from Spektrix UK, who talked us through all of the exciting upselling opportunities that are possible with Spektrix’s custom baskets.

The prevalence of great digital content, gives audiences a new incentive to log in to account. We’re really excited about the potential for personalisation that comes next.

If you’d like to chat to us about tags, paywall, personalisation (or anything else for that matter) do get in touch. We’re here to help.