Montserrat Live

Connecting Montserrat's festival moments through a shared digital experience.

Product Engineering ? Content Aggregation ? Digital Media ? March 2026

The Opportunity

Montserrat's St. Patrick's Festival brings people together through cultural celebrations and events across the island. Much of that experience is shared online, but the content is scattered across social media platforms, event organisers and individual accounts.

This makes it difficult for residents, visitors and people following from abroad to discover what is happening across the island in one place.

Montserrat Live began as an opportunity to address that fragmentation.

The idea was to bring existing festival content together into a single experience, making it easier to discover and participate in the celebrations while preserving recognition for the original content creators.

Beyond solving a discovery problem, the platform also presented opportunities for event organisers and promoters to connect their audiences with relevant coverage.

The Solution

Montserrat Live was developed as a mobile-first content aggregation platform for the 2026 St. Patrick's Festival.

It collected publicly available festival content from multiple social media sources and presented it in a continuously updated feed.

The platform introduced several capabilities:

• Unified content discovery: Festival posts, videos and moments from different sources presented in one feed, with attribution and links to original creators.
• Community engagement: Visitors could like and boost content, influencing which posts received greater visibility.
• Dedicated event feeds: Organisers and promoters could present content related to individual events.
• Content ranking: Posts were organised using engagement, recency and source relevance to improve discovery.

Rather than replacing existing social platforms, Montserrat Live connected their content into a shared festival experience.

Engineering & Delivery

The platform was designed, developed and launched within a short timeframe to support the festival season.

StartUp Media implemented a Next.js monorepo architecture containing the public application, administration dashboard, business portal and background processing services.

The engineering work included automated content ingestion using BullMQ, Redis and third-party data providers, alongside scheduled processing, retry mechanisms and fault handling for external service failures.

Content ranking algorithms combined engagement, recency and source weighting. Authentication, analytics and billing capabilities were integrated using Clerk, PostHog and Stripe.

The applications were deployed through Vercel, with Docker-based worker services supporting independent background processing.

This architecture enabled the platform to operate during a live festival while providing a technical foundation for further development.

Results & Impact

Montserrat Live demonstrated that festival content distributed across multiple social media sources could be consolidated into a single, interactive experience.

The platform also recorded approximately 2,000 combined content views, likes and boosts, alongside 110 sessions and 269 page views.

These results established the technical feasibility of the platform and provided initial evidence of audience interaction. However, the limited visitor numbers did not establish sufficient demand for an ongoing commercial service.

Challenges & Lessons Learned

Operating the platform revealed several requirements beyond the software itself.

Content infrastructure

Although hundreds of posts were aggregated, much of the available content consisted of personal posts, shares and reposts. Consistent original coverage was limited, with some events having only one or two active content creators.

The platform could bring available content together, but it could not independently create the coverage needed to deliver a comprehensive festival experience.

A sustainable version would require stronger relationships with event organisers, content creators and media producers.

Operational sustainability

The initial release operated without a dedicated budget.

As external data ingestion began generating costs, automated hourly processing was reduced in favour of manually triggered jobs during quieter periods.

This controlled expenditure while revealing opportunities for more efficient, activity-aware processing.

It also demonstrated that the technical operating model needed to reflect the availability of content and the resources supporting the platform.

Commercial viability

Dedicated event feeds and promoter participation presented potential commercial opportunities.

However, the initial festival release did not validate customer demand, willingness to pay or the level of audience participation needed to support those services.

Continuing to invest in the platform without resolving these questions would have introduced additional financial risk.

Following the festival season, Montserrat Live was taken offline rather than maintained as an ongoing service without a sustainable operating model.

The Outcome

Montserrat Live achieved its initial purpose of bringing fragmented festival content into a shared digital experience.

It demonstrated StartUp Media's ability to identify an opportunity, design and deliver a production platform, integrate external services and operate the solution during a live event.

Just as importantly, it revealed what would be required to turn the platform into a sustainable service.

The technology made the experience possible. The next opportunity is to establish the content, partnerships and operating model needed to make it sustainable.

This distinction is central to how StartUp Media approaches software and product engineering: understanding not only what technology can deliver, but also the business and operational conditions needed for it to create lasting value.

Looking Ahead

Montserrat Live remains a potential platform for future festival seasons.

Further development would focus on establishing content production partnerships, improving audience distribution, and designing a sustainable operational model before expanding the platform.

The opportunity extends beyond aggregating existing posts. With the right supporting infrastructure, Montserrat Live could help organisers, creators and audiences participate in a more connected digital festival experience.

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StartUp Media — Independent Product Engineering Project
March 2026