Just in time for the start of general rehearsals on Thursday, July 17, 2008, the Bayreuth Festival website is entering a new era. The redesigned homepage will then offer not only the usual information on the festival’s schedule, cast, and artistic direction, but also numerous features that allow for a very special, multimedia insight into the festival events and provide interesting information on the architecture and history of Bayreuth Festival.
The Video Guide offers a virtual tour of the Festspielhaus with German and English videos on the individual work areas, workshops, architecture, and festival grounds. In the daily podcast, Wagner fans around the world can follow during the festival season how the workshops operate, rehearsals proceed, and the annual productions are created. Books and merchandising articles can be viewed and ordered in the festival’s online shop.
BF Medien GmbH, together with its Bayreuth technology partner TMT and employees of Bayreuth Festival, worked at full speed for just under two months on the implementation of the elaborate homepage to meet the planned relaunch date of July 17, 2008. “Nevertheless, there will still be a few things that may not yet be present on the homepage on Thursday”, says Michael Kolb, one of the responsible employees of TMT. However, they are successively working on expanding the homepage further, equipping it with more features in the coming months, and thus making it more attractive than ever. “We are also working very intensively on the implementation of the English-language pages”, reports Kolb. “But here, too, we will be able to activate the corresponding pages in the next few days.”