Each May Morning, the Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford sings from the top of the college tower to thousands of people gathered in the streets below — a centuries-old Oxford tradition beginning at 6am on 1 May.
From 2023 to 2026, I provided technical production for the choir’s annual May Morning livestream, developing a remote multi-camera workflow that allowed the event to be broadcast live to audiences on YouTube and Facebook.
Multiple iPhones positioned around the top of Magdalen Tower provided a mixture of wide shots and close-ups, with their feeds sent over the internet to my vMix production system in Wales. From there I vision-mixed the programme, managed audio, graphics and pre-recorded elements, monitored the incoming connections and delivered the finished livestream to multiple platforms.
The unusual location created a number of technical challenges: the cameras were high on a medieval tower, access and setup time were limited, thousands of mobile phones were competing for local network capacity below, and the entire performance lasted only a few minutes — leaving no opportunity to repeat anything if a connection failed.
The production developed considerably over successive years, adding redundant camera and audio sources, SRT contribution feeds, local ISO recordings and, eventually, a Starlink connection at the top of the tower to provide dedicated internet connectivity. Backup footage and alternative mobile networks were also incorporated so the broadcast could continue if an individual camera or connection was lost.
The result was a compact distributed production in which the camera operators could concentrate on capturing the event in Oxford while the live switching, monitoring and streaming infrastructure was operated remotely more than 100 miles away.
