UPDATE: Even more surprising is that Youku have suspended ALL of their services tonight to broadcast this event. We imagine some serious $$’s have exchanged hands. Check it out NOW at YOUKU
Nokia 5800 Youku Live Broadcast
The music still needs some work though. Tuneless lip syncing. Blergh!
According to this press release, Nokia and Youku (China’s video sharing site) will webcast a concert to over 1m people tomorrow night from Beijing.
Webcasting is not a new phenomenon. The persons behind this lowly blog were the first people to webcast a major festival in the UK back in 1999, to a total of 17 concurrent viewers. In this case, the novelty items are the viewer’s ability to choose between 4 camera angles in real time and comment/ interact with other people via a live chatroom, similar to the one in which CNN and Facebook teamed up to allow over 18m people to watch the inauguration of Obama back in January.
The mini-site for Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Interactive Online Concert consists of three sections: a live video stream of the concert, an interactive video press room, and a real-time archive for video clips of the concert. While watching the online concert, Youku users can choose their favorite angle from 4 different live streams in one window. They can also vote for their favorite performer, and the artist who wins the most online votes will give an encore performance at the show’s end. After finishing their on-stage performances, the artists will move to the interactive press room to answer questions submitted by netizens. Meanwhile, all the video clips will be archived in real time for later viewing.
It’s a good use of the concert medium to get more eyeballs and interaction. Youku are certainly making a big play to be different from Tudou and their other competitors here in China, while at the same time firming up big name client relationships. We imagine we will be seeing much more of this in the future.