Massive Live Broadcasts – U2 Concert on YouTube

Everyone is talking about the big concert U2 gave online Sunday night via YouTube. Well actually, what they are really talking about is the fact that 1 million people were watching the live stream. YouTube announced early last week that the stream would broadcast to about 16 countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Even Bono himself said in an interview that the focus should be on the audience for making history. Wow. Extremely insightful. No wonder the whole blogosphere and Twittersphere are still posting about it. How often do people from so many different cultures and countries have an opportunity to participate in a big happening like this? I think we can expect more and more of this in the future as users tire of the virtual islands they have created for themselves online, and are now seeking to get back that fuzzy feeling that makes us human.

There is a lot of educational info in the coverage by MediaPost:

Jim Louderback, Revision3 CEO, who will participate on a panel at OMMA Video Friday in Los Angeles, Calif., says the Internet was not designed to deliver real-time streaming media, but rather built to “store-it-forward.”

When it comes to video, many people believe picture quality is more important. But when streaming a band, audio is just as important — sometimes more. Dropping a frame or two every now and then isn’t a big deal, but fans immediately notice a hiccup in the audio.

“To get audio and video to arrive at the same time you need a lot of bandwidth,” he says. “It’s not like television where the feeds are shared. If they are delivering a million simultaneous streams, every person watching has a unique stream being sent to them. If you have one million people watching, you have one million streams feeding from the content delivery network out to the homes.”

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YouTube will release actual figures about the live broadcast later on in the week but I would just like to point out that this is exactly what sets 3DCDN apart in this sector. YouTube had to stream one million unique streams for every single person watching. That’s quite a lot of bandwidth and we all know Google can afford it …

However 3Dcdn has developed a very unique and advanced technology that actually leverages the fact that so many people are watching the same event, to deliver a superior quality broadcast that consumes a lot less bandwidth. That is what ‘optimizing the last mile’ in our pitch is all about. Granted we are not in a position to take on Google at this stage but in an increasingly green world, it is good to know that the technology for doing more with less is coming of age.