exploremusic

How far we’ve come in ten years.

Back on December 14, 1999, Paul McCartney netcast a gig from the Cavern Club, the Liverpool venue where the Beatles got their start.  I can’t remember exactly what software I used—I’m pretty sure it was RealAudio/RealVideo—but I do recall that it was an unholy mess.  I had broadband at the time, but it was nowhere near as fast or reliable as what’s available today.  Quality was horrible, the stream kept dropping out and the video window was so small that your eyes hurt. 

Still, the company that staged the event was confident that this was the business model of the future.  Instead of going to concerts, we’d sit at home and watch them online.  They even started a series of netcast where they attempted to charge people for this iffy quality content.  Needless to say, they’re not around anymore.

I watch last night’s U2 YouTube webcast on a 24-inch Dell monitor.  In the standard YouTube player window, the video look crisp with no smear or jerkiness while the audio remained perfectly locked in sync.  Quality was less in full-screen mode—lots of blocky pixels—but if I sat back about four feet, it was more than passable.

While all this was going on, a Twitter stream ran below the YouTube player window.  By the middle of the gig, I was told that 2,000 tweets a minute were being process (and, by my reckoning, an unholy amount coming from Brazil).  Towards the end of the show, my info says that the rate had increased to 1,000 tweets a second.  Props to Twitter:  no Whale Fail.

So from the desktop, things worked great.  Other methods accessing the show weren’t so good.  I tried my iPhone’s YouTube client but was met with the message “access blocked by user.”  And before you think this has something to do with U2’s break with Apple and bolt for RIM, Blackberrys couldn’t access the stream either—or so I’m told.  Fellow tweeters also complained that the stream was inaccessible through Apple TV and PS3.  Only one guy said he was getting the show on his mobile device—and he was using Windows Mobile 6.5.

Mobile access aside—and that probably has more to do with the wireless companies than either YouTube or Google—the netcast was as close to flawless as anyone could have expected in 2009.  Score a big win for YouTube.

Meanwhile, Google—YouTube’s parent—were collecting TONS of user data.  This is where it gets really interesting.

[Check back for Part 3]