News: Did you catch the iPhone’s first streaming concert?

By iphoneblog on Sep 03, 2009 with Comments 0

iphoneunderworld

Apple isn’t the first company to get involved in live streaming of musical performances, but they are the first to try and put it in your pocket. This past Saturday the UK electronic group Underworld performed a concert live from Oakland, California, and for the first time ever you were able to watch this streamed live to your iPhone.

Live concert streaming seems to be gaining a lot of traction in 2009, and this is just the latest attempt to incorporate that into an already successful platform. Back in June, for example, Hulu brought its users a live performance by the Dave Matthews Band.

While nothing has been confirmed regarding future concerts on either the iPhone or Hulu, I find it hard to believe this is the last stop. There’s a lot of potential for both platforms to shape an experience that’s unique to what they’re offering. It’s not inconcievable to think that we might see a “Concert Series” subscription come to iTunes, or some brilliant behind-the-scenes NBC performances live on Hulu. Who wouldn’t want to live stream the rehearsal’s of Saturday Night Live musical guests?

The idea of streaming a concert over the internet is far from new. A number of performers have attempted to stream concert footage dating all the way back to 1998, when John Tesh performed an intimate concert online by opening up whopping 100 phone line connections. When you realize how many millions upon millions of people will tune in tonight, it’s kind of quaint and awe-inspiring when you think about the lengths Tesh had to go to perform to 60 people in the dial-up era.

It seems kind of strange that this Underworld streaming was announced so last minute (the news broke Saturday morning), yet there seems to be a general consensus amongst a number of blogs on why this information was held back. The folks at NewTeeVee are suggesting that AT&T held onto the announcement for fear of their network being overloaded, which certainly doesn’t seem too far fetched a possibility. Despite the delay in announcement, I’m sure the AT&T network went through a real stress-test Saturday night.

And yet things weren’t necesarily as “live” as advertised. TechRadar is reporting that the concert itself actually took place the night before. While the event was likely recorded in its entirety, and the broadcast still went out live, there’s definitely a difference between live and live-to-tape. Regardless, multiple sites are reporting the event was executed flawlessly, with high quality video and audio broadcast to the masses with nary a stumbling block in sight.

To our readers who were lucky enough to hear about the event on Saturday, did you check it out? How did you find the quality? Was the stream as flawless as everyone is saying?