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More Live 8 Frustrations

No, I'm not talking about the political goal of Live 8 itself. I'm going to talk about the music portion of the event. More specifically, access to coverage of the event.

As we all know by now, MTV totally botched their live coverage of the Live 8 event. After thousands of complaints, MTV and VH1 will air the concerts in a more complete format tomorrow. That is all well and good, but it's still going to be hours of coverage. Do you think I was able to find any kind of a schedule on MTV's confusing and hard-to-navigate website? No can do. I would DEFINITELY be more likely to watch their new coverage if I could see WHEN the artists I'm interested in watching are going to be aired! I'm not about to sit on my couch all day just to catch U2's performance.

So why don't you watch it on AOL, you ask? I have FINALLY been able to do so. As I've said before, my experiences with video on the internet have been mixed. Today I decided to try again to watch the online coverage, which is now archived and will be for a while. The first time I tried, I got a nasty "this feature will not work with Firefox" message. What a slap in the face! Luckily, I also keep Netscape around for these situations, so I tried watching on that. I got a little bit farther with that, although I had to install an AOL media plugin. That didn't take too long, though, and then I was on my way to trying to watch a Coldplay song. For whatever reason, I could not get the video to work. I just got a black screen for minutes at a time. Well, I'm not patient enough to sit for ten minutes to get ONE song to play!

Thankfully, my family are also customers of the AOL service, so I got on there to try once again. Navigation was made easier because of the "Live 8" stamped by their "music" category. FINALLY, I was able to make the clip work. It seems to play pretty well, so I think I've found the way to go.

Why, I ask, must it be so hard for a person to simply watch what they would like to watch? For all the press AOL has received about their positive Live 8 coverage, I think they still have work to do to make the video work for EVERYone. Video on the net in general is not where it needs to be to compete with TV. I would prefer watching Live 8 on TV if I could get some kind of schedule!

So, I'll continue watching what I can on AOL and then be done with it. These concerts have turned out to be a hassle, even if they will go down in history as the biggest concert events of the past 30 years.