NEP Trio Video Makes it Seven Years Straight at Lollapalooza

NEP Trio Video has completed its seventh successful year as sole provider of mobile video production facilities and services for the Lollapalooza music festival, which took place Aug. 3-5 in Chicago. Under contract by Springboard Productions for promoter C3 Presents, NEP Trio Video provided four production vehicles that supplied more than 60 hours of HD video footage for the festival webcast, featured on two YouTube channels, as well as the Lollapalooza Festival Network.

Recently acquired by NEP, Trio Video has its roots in Chicago-based professional sports coverage but has built a sizeable market share around production for the United States’ highest profile outdoor music festivals — including Lollapalooza, the Bonnaroo Music Festival, the Austin City Limits Festival, and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

At this year’s Lollapalooza, NEP Trio Video’s Tango, Beta, and Blues, and NEP Supershooters’ SS14 mobile units supplied 21 cameras capturing more than 80 bands, which performed on five stages to an estimated on-site festival audience of 100,000 and a worldwide webcast audience of millions. In addition to supporting the webcasts, NEP Trio Video provided a private festival network that delivered live HD video to “Lolla Lounge” VIP tents and to large-format monitors and LED screens — supplied and operated by NEP Screenworks — throughout the venue.

As it has at many recent Music festivals, NEP Trio Video recorded all Lollapalooza content digitally, bringing time and cost savings to a production environment that traditionally has been tape-based.

“Not only does this tapeless workflow cut production costs by up to 75 percent, but it also represents a huge time savings and means that large quantities of content can be made immediately available for distribution, webcast, or broadcast,” says Peter Kimball, senior account manager at NEP Trio Video. “It’s one more example of the innovation that defines the quality of our music festival coverage, including HD webcasts that often receive higher viewership than many prime-time television programs.”

The on-site Lollapalooza festival network supplied by NEP Trio Video took on an important public safety role when a powerful thunderstorm struck the show on Saturday, Aug. 4, suspending the program for more than two hours and forcing concertgoers to find shelter in nearby downtown buildings. The festival network fed evacuation announcements and information to more than 40 locations including the large NEP Screenworks Image screens on the main stages.

“The NEP Trio Video engineers are to be commended for their prompt action in helping to support a calm, orderly evacuation, and then for safely getting all trucks back online in time to webcast the headliner acts that evening — including the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Avicii,” says Hank Neuberger, executive producer for Springboard Productions.