The AP reports that the just completed worldwide Live Aid concert broke all records for live streaming. An arrangement with AOL allowed the concert organizers to stream all ten concert venues live over the Internet. It smashed every existing streaming broadcast record, and AOL reported that they have more than 150,000 simultanteos viewers.
The MTV broadcast was reported a complete dud by comparison. While AOL was able to provide all ten concert venues simultaneously, which let the viewer choose what they wanted to watch, MTV had to constantly switch from one location to another--an artifact of the old, analog-based channel system. MTV also apparently had as much ad time as concert viewing, another weakness of the old TV system. With a Internet-based, Web-enabled viewing mechanism, it's possible to view the content and ads simultaneously in the same window--a win-win situation in which the viewer has more control but the advertiser still gets the put the ad in front of them.
What is also interesting is that the technology to do video streaming is mature enough to do large, multi-site programs like the concert and support 100,000+ simultaneous viewers. And this was done on an Internet infrastructure that was not even designed to support this sort of thing. Ten years from now, this will be commonplace.
Who won? Content providers, advertisers, and viewers. Who lost? Hollywood and the old TV conglomerates have lost, and lost big.