On Sunday, U2 played a gig at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in California as part of their current world tour. It streamed live on YouTube and managed to rack up 10 million viewers. Which is a huge success for both Google and the Akamai content delivery network which handled the event.

Live Success

YouTube is no stranger to live streaming, having experimented with the method of broadcasting a few times since being acquired by Google. However, Sunday night’s U2 concert was a hit like the site has never experienced before.

When competing with the bread and butter of YouTube – the viral videos generated by users – the U2 concert was a relative failure, but gaining such a large audience for an event such as this is nothing short of spectacular.

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Google, the owner of YouTube, is a sucker for information. It lives only because of data it collects about all of us as we mosey our way around the Web. But privacy concerns are now behind Google being dropped as the official carrier of President Obama’s weekly addresses.

YouTube Helped Obama Win

During the Presidential election, Barack Obama and his team used YouTube extensively in order to spread the message of hope and unification. Over 1800 clips were uploaded to Obama’s YouTube page over the two year campaign, and those videos garnered over 110 million page views.

This level of video posting was unprecedented in an election, and no doubt, along with all the other forms of social media Obama’s team utilized, helped him win.

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For many, the concept of standards brings up images of starting from scratch, a competitive slow-down and endless development hours.

I imagine this is true for many in the online video industry – an industry where the battlefield is fierce and everyone is fervently trying to elbow ahead of their competitors.

However, this hesitation is unfounded and, in truth, short-sighted. Sure, there is huge growth and money to be made in web video now, but without a universal open standard for video platforms, it cannot reach its potential of becoming truly ubiquitous.

Aren’t We Giving Away the Cow for Free?

Developing standards begins as simply as defining what constitutes a video player and openly sharing that definition and source code with the public. Some might find the idea of allowing companies to develop their own custom players cannibalistic to the industry (why would they hire an online video platform provider if they can build it themselves?), but, in reality, the value of online video has little to do with the player.

A new study by Jupiter Research, commissioned by Akamai Technologies, reports that more than half of all viewers of online video will quickly switch to a competing video site when poor quality video performance is encountered.

“Today’s consumers demand immediate start-up times, 100% availability, and an experience that is constant over time. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to meet those expectations when delivering content from a centralized server.” Mark Larkin, Executive Producer, CNET TV.

The report states that online videos which interrupt to buffer or are slow to load account for the greatest sources of audience frustration. 60% of frequent online video viewers who watch videos more than once per week are unlikely to return to a video content site after a poor quality experience. 25% said they would never return.

The release candidate (RC) of the long awaited Microsoft Silverlight multimedia authoring, encoding and user platform, a direct competitor to the Adobe Flash environment, has been released.

Silverlight’s cross-browser, cross-platform approach targets content providers who distribute video and rich media over the Internet; developers and designers who build rich interactive applications; and end users who seek a better quality experience in viewing Web-based media.

The Major League Baseball playoffs will use Silverlight as their new online video platform. Microsoft also has Silverlight partners in Akamai Technologies, Brightcove, Eyeblaster, and Netflix.

Whether Silverlight will make as small a dent in Adobe’s dominance in the field as Microsoft’s XPS did to PDF remains to be seen.

[Via PC Magazine]

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CBS has decided to really take the bull by the horns and bring a lot of its content onto the internet including full TV shows (think CSI, Survivor and Late Show with David Letterman) as well as numerous sporting events including championship boxing.

Its new online TV service is called “Interactive Audience Network” and is really giving the finger to YouTube.

Who needs YouTube

This is one of the biggest pushes to bring traditional TV content online we’ve seen to date.

CBS has agreed distribution deals for all this TV content with a number of online platforms, but guess what, no YouTube.