Via an earlier Techcrunch article, Shakira just livestreamed her latest music video via Ustream and Facebook. This is another major artist helping to validate both Social TV and the livestream format. I’m sure U2′s recent live concert on YouTube made this decision easier (10 million streams might do that), but 2009 is definitely shaping up to be the year the masses started embracing Social TV – at least online. What will be interesting is to see how Traditional Media tries to screw this up…
Fee vs. Free Online Video. (Emarketer) The eMarketer report “Marketing to the Online Video Audience” highlighted this split among online video viewers. Most would prefer to watch video for free, but a significant minority is willing to pay in order to avoid at least some advertising. That suggests a hybrid model of reduced advertising along with smaller fees-similar to cable TV.
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.
