u2 live worldwide (sorta) on youtube from rose bowl

U2 live on YouTube, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Not holding our breaths here anymore, though only ten minutes separate us from U2 going live on Rose Bowl, and in 16 countries, via YouTube. The image quality is terrible, one cannot tell the hand of a good live broadcast director, and instead of a MC we had Rocko (or something like that) from the stage building team (!) tell us that Antartica will get U2 tonight. Not what I heard, but an original messenger nevertheless, and the world might feel better knowing that penguins will hear Bono (no, they won't, unless they're good at manipulating IP addresses).

In the image you see U2 arriving at the stadium. That is, if you can tell their faces. The Edge went on at some point (live? recorded? hard to spot the difference in the half hour leading to the act) and told us that millions of eyeballs, or billions (same thing, I agree) were going to be on them tonight. Exciting! Historical! And a level of amateurism on both the side of YouTube and that of U2 that I haven't seen in ages. But, wait till we go live in three minutes. The world will come to a stop, right?

It reminds me of seeing Bono and The Edge on the couch of Jonathan Ross months back, promoting the new tour as it had 1) a 360 degrees stage and 2) a cheap ticket (35 EUR). They looked uncomfortable, if not fearful, had little to say and hardly any humor. And now we're live, with the same bad direction, and random changes in sound level. It is extremely underwhelming, far from the future of broadcast, and not able to make us feel as engaged as normal live events do on TV. Bad execution may explain why.

Either way, it looks like there's no U2 party going on worldwide. I'm off to bed.