I was originally intending for this post-Coachella entry to be about all the cool emerging media and tech at this year’s Coachella festival. Instead, it’s going to be a rant against AT&T. Not only was cell service non-existent for basic calls, text messages and even email but trying to use the mobile web was an even worse nightmare. What makes this ironic is that the festival ran out of paper schedules by early Saturday and directed people to the Coachella iPhone App which didn’t really help you find your way around. So not only could you not contact friends to meet somewhere but you also had to rely on the sparsely located stationery “Here you are” map areas to locate certain stages. And that’s if you happened to already have the app installed – there was no way you were going to be able to download the app with non-existent service.
What about the advanced emerging media and tech like mobile marketing with QR codes, livestreaming and social media updates? Not a chance. I only found out after the fact that most of the tweets I was sending out at the fest weren’t actually going out. And I didn’t even bother to livestream any of the bands knowing that the AT&T network was useless. You would think with 75,000+ people at Coachella every day that someone would have thought, “maybe we should get some mobile cell towers in there like we did for SXSW to improve service for our customers.” Nope. And I don’t seem to be the only one that’s frustrated with this clear lack of planning by AT&T.
So there you have it. I’m not sure how Apple can continue to market livestreaming and other advanced features and apps for the iPhone when it’s pretty clear that AT&T cannot keep up with demand. With projections of mobile web usage continuing to skyrocket, I think the upward trend on this graph will clearly outpace the time it takes for AT&T to get it’s act together or just render their entire network useless. And as long as Apple is tied to AT&T, I don’t think mobile interactive video will take off this year as hoped with the rumored iPhone 4G coming out. Another post for another time though…
In closing, if you want to know how the overall festival went (sans any cell or internet service), there’s some good footage on both YouTube and Ustream. RFID technology continues to gain ground at events as you can see from the picture above of the Coachella wristband. You can also see some of the praise and complaining on twitter with hashtag #coachella. And if you are still not a fan of Muse, you have obviously not been enlightened yet!
Q&A: OK Go’s Lead Singer Tells Us Secrets of the Band’s Geeky Videos – You can’t make ‘viral’ videos, but these guys come as close as it gets to tapping into content that will become viral…
I’ve been pretty critical of YouTube in the past in regards to YouTube needing to embrace live video or let Ustream, Justin.TV, and other Livestreaming sites become the new video communities on the web. Well I’m keeping my mouth shut for awhile because YouTube and U2 have just put on the most impressive display of Livestreaming yet. Streaming live from the Rose Bowl, U2′s concert was impressive from both an audio and visual standpoint. The live stream was pretty stable throughout the event and the audio was on par with what you would expect from watching a live concert on the web. It will be interesting to see the traffic numbers released from YouTube because on my end there was little to no hiccups with the stream itself. (UPDATE: 10 Million streams!!!!)
In terms of interactivity though, outside a real-time Twitter page embedded on the U2′s YouTube Home Page, there wasn’t much. There were multiple cameras views throughout the live video event, so I can understand given the anticipated traffic for the event that there wouldn’t be any user control of different live video feeds, but no other interactivity? I also noticed a lack on advertising anywhere on the page or video, so also surprised that there wasn’t any type of sponsor or other branded interactive feature.
Outside of that, this was an impressive outing from YouTube and U2. No, actually this was was the best Livestream large scale event I’ve seen yet. From the Twitter stream itself, you could see that this was indeed a live worldwide event happening in real-time bringing U2 fans together for an experience. This was the next best thing to actually being at the concert and one could argue given the multiple camera angles, visual/audio quality and integration of worldwide fans that it was something a little more special…
(If you haven’t been able to tell yet, I’m a complete U2 Homer to the point one of my old class projects in 1997 was using U2 imagery and music to do my very first Premiere project…)
We Are Organized Chaos (WAOC) is Zugara’s (www.zugara.com) interactive marketing and advertising blog where we’ll be featuring some great projects and discussing upcoming trends in the digital world. Work — good and bad — will be critiqued. Hope you’ll enjoy reading our insights and thoughts on interactive.
