Your public web site is available online to the entire world and often contains a mix of times for online events and in-person events as well as dates without times attached and full times. SparqFest manages all times so that they are presented in a format that makes the most sense for each specified audience member in the context in which they are interacting with the web site.
You configure timezones in a number of places:
- The official “festival timezone” in your edition settings
- Venue timezones for each venue in your venue settings (defaults to festival time zone)
- You can also define special timezone preferences for virtual screenings
In general, in-person events are governed by the venue timezone and online events by the festival timezone.
Times for In-Person Events
All times for in-person events are shown in the timezone associated with the event venue regardless of the visitor's time zone. The purpose of this configuration is to make sure that someone traveling to the festival without setting their device to the local time zone will see the proper times.
Some festivals also have a complicating factor that they may span time zones. Consider a festival in a location right on a time zone border. They may have venues in both time zones. By always displaying an in-person event in the venue time zone, we minimize the opportunity for confusion in what is unavoidably a very confusing scenario.
Times for Online Events
When programming online events (specifically, virtual screenings), you sometimes have the option to set a time in the user's local time zone or in the festival time zone. Most festival directors set their start times to the festival time zone. If, however, you want to configure “a premiere that runs at noon in the user's timezone”, SparqFest supports this option.
Why Set a Screening to the User Timezone?
Any time you have a special screening like a world premiere, you exclude half the world when you set the screening for a fixed time. After all, if you set your world premiere to run from noon until 2pm in London, it will be the middle of the night in Hawaii. To make the premiere more accessible, you can configure the screening for the user time zone. In that scenario, the premiere is available in a rolling fashion worldwide at noon in each local timezone. London viewers can watch from noon until 2pm London time, while Honolulu viewers can avoid waking up in the middle and instead watch from noon until 2pm Honolulu time.
Times for online events are always translated into the visitor's local time zone, regardless of what kind of event or how it is configured. You program the event in the festival timezone, and the viewer sees that date in their timezone. SparqFest handles the timezone translation for the viewer.
Display of Dates without Times
Where festival directors can become most confused is when they see standalone dates without times (for example, the start and end dates for the festival).
Even though these are dates, they are still translated to the viewer's local timezone. That includes the in-person start/end dates.
A start date is really 00:00 (midnight) on the day your festival starts in the festival timezone. An end date is really 23:59 on the last day of your festival in the festival timezone. The start and end dates are thus the day you specified for half of the world and either the day before or the day after for the other half.
Let's consider a festival in New York that starts on June 1 and ends June 5. People in New York will see that the festival runs June 1-5 when they visit the site. People in Chicago, however, will see that the festival runs May 31-June 5 (00:00 EDT June 1 is 23:00 CDT May 31). People in London will see that the festival runs June 1-6 (23:59 June 5 EDT is 04:59 June 6 BST).
The Special Timezone: UTC
UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the official timezone of the world and is more or less the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). It has no summer time/daylight savings time.
A very confusing aspect of UTC is that UTC isn't anywhere. More precisely, there's no location on Earth whose timezone is UTC. London is GMT/BST, not UTC. That's why you should think of UTC as the timezone of the world when programming your festival.
If you have a hybrid or purely in-person festival, you should NOT be using UTC for anything. In particular, if you are in the UK, you should specify Europe/London for your timezone.
What happens in the UK if I use UTC?
You might think that, being in the UK, you would be indifferent to using UTC or GMT or Europe/London as your timezone. Unfortunately, that's not correct. Errors in programming your festival can be hidden from you until they become critical if you incorrectly set your timezone to UTC.
If your festival is in the winter, you might get lucky since UTC and GMT (the winter time for the UK) carry the same time during the winter. On the other hand, while noon UTC is noon GMT, it is 1pm BST (British Summer Time). Consequently, UK festivals will show the wrong times for summer events if they are set to UTC.
Of course, it's not simply UK festivals who would see the wrong times when setting their festival timezone to UTC. The challenge for UK festivals, however, is that the times may not immediately look wrong. If, for example, you are programming a June festival in February, the dates will look correct until the BST changeover.
UTC does have a place for purely online festival with no in-person components targeting an international audience. In that scenario, it does not really matter what your “festival timezone” is, but setting it to UTC is often a neutral way to program your times.