Ahead of the Love Island All Stars finale we saw a unique opportunity to take our TikTok audience behind the scenes with the hope to bring even more of them to the show’s live final. It was a huge collaborative effort from the Digital Team, Tech Team, the Love Island Exec Team and TikTok to make it all possible, and we couldn’t have been more pleased with result.
In the months before going live the tech team worked tirelessly to ensure we had a robust stream with plenty of failsafes just in case we encountered any issues during the live. We collaborated with TikTok to ensure we were doing as much as we could for the platform and to get as much best practice information as possible – they even switched their own ‘like’ heart to be the official Love Island heart.
For the set up itself we had a roaming camera that was rigged to be portrait and it followed Indiyah Polack as she moved freely around the garden. Although that was our plan A, the tech team wanted to ensure we had a backup so we could stay live for as long as possible. They created a makeshift separate gallery and rotated various rigged Villa cameras 90 degrees to be portrait to use incase we lost signal to our roaming camera.
The live show lasted just over 30 minutes and followed Indiyah as she spoke to each of the series’ Dumped Islanders. The backdrop was ever changing but always captured the excitement of the Villa being set up, the audience getting excited, as well as the arrival of our finalists and Maya Jama herself.
The stream was classed as a “popular live” on TikTok within the first 5 minutes, generated 1.5m likes by the time we finished and it consolidated at 160k viewers within the 30 minute window.
We wanted to push our duration for as long as possible and to get as close to the 9pm launch of the show, and we ended up having to finish the live 5 minutes out from the show starting. We used the last few minutes to push to the show and left up an end card with the TX details before terminating just before 9pm.