It’s hard to resist borrowing this play on words from the title of a TechCrunch article, but it’s true! The mega-band U2 played live in Los Angeles on October 25th, simultaneously broadcasting on YouTube. In fact, it was promoted as the first global concert webcast on “U2ube”. Unfortunately, it wasn’t available live to the *entire* globe—out of the over 190 countries in the world only 16 countries saw it live: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, U.K., and of course, the U.S., where the concert took place.
During the show, YouTube also featured a Twitter widget below the video player that displayed tweets from people who used the #U2webcast hashtag.
“U2 and technology have long gone hand in hand,” writes MG Siegler of TechCruch. “Their ZooTV tour famously featured a massive amount of television monitors and live streaming video from all around the world.” Later, U2 got chummy with Apple, releasing their own branded iPod. Then after U2 lead singer Bono became a partner in a firm that purchased a huge stake in Palm, U2’s recent tour has been sponsored by Palm and BlackBerry.
10 million people viewed the live stream on YouTube that night, according to Variety—and it went impressively smoothly. Though 10 million is nothing compared to some of the most popular television shows, but we’re starting to see audience of comparable sizes from all over the world.
And, as our title declares, the recorded version of the full 2-1/2 hour concert is now officially being shown on YouTube, and it had over a million views in the first 3 days. A little over a week later, it has had 1,932,240 views.
It’s a brave, new, rockin’ world, made possible with internet speed.
Tags: Internet Speed, Twitter, YouTube