Internet Live8 rocks

By Beth Gillin
July 4, 2005
London's Live8 concert.

London's Live8 concert.
Photo: AFP

If Live Aid helped launch MTV as a media powerhouse two decades ago, Live 8 not only dethroned the music channel, but it also made it seem quaintly old-fashioned.

The internet left TV in the dust. To put it bluntly, MTV sank and AOL soared.

More than five million people logged onto the web to watch the concerts, with 175,000 simultaneous streams at any one time, making it "by far the biggest internet event in history", said AOL vice-president Ruth Sarfaty.

It's easy to see why.

AOL offered, for free, streaming video from concert stages in Philadelphia; Paris; London; Berlin; Barrie, Canada; and Rome, with brief side trips to Johannesburg. The online service did not stream from the concerts in Moscow; Tokyo; and Cornwall, England. Adding up all 10 venues, 200 acts provided almost 70 hours of music.

Any citizen of the world with a high-speed connection could visit the six main stages by clicking, following a music link, and inputting a connection speed.

And a worldwide event that might once have seemed made for MTV proved a perfect fit for the web.

Meanwhile, MTV, which shared its Live 8 feed with competitor VH1 and college station mtvU, frustrated viewers by showing little of the music and saturating the screen with commercials, interspersed with banal interviews with perfectly nice audience members who were all - surprise - opposed to poverty.

Showing marketing savvy, AOL - which bought the rights to Live 8 and resold them to TV and radio - will continue to stream Live 8's concerts for free on demand for six weeks.

So if you missed it live, you'll still be able to catch Brian Wilson, the ex-Beach Boy, rise from his keyboard with a smile and do a little dance across the Berlin stage to Fun, Fun, Fun.

A click, and you can see the newly hippyfied Faith Hill covering Janis Joplin in Rome. Another, and Will Smith is getting jiggy in Philly.

The camera work and sound were excellent, and there were just enough reaction shots to make a viewer ponder why the Paris crowd was exuberant but the Romans mellow to the point of listlessness.

MTV, on the other hand, offered fragments.

Say My Name by Destiny's Child, for example, was cut short by an earnest narrator intoning: "850 million people go to bed hungry every day."

That's awful, but before you had time to feel bad about it, along came commercials for the new Batman flick, the latest Billy Corgan CD, Jessica Simpson's favourite acne remedy and Vonage, which is apparently a phone service for people who fall into fountains.

Live 8 organisers predicted that the day's concerts would be available to 5.5 billion people, via the internet and 182 TV and 2,000 radio networks and stations around the world. Not to mention video-equipped mobile phones.

Some packaged highlights of the concerts into specials for later viewing. But only the internet made you feel as if you were there.

