I knew for sure that AOL had succeeded in its bid for online musical history when I turned down the sound on my widescreen TV — turned off by MTV as it squandered a great opportunity — and went back to enjoy the experience via AOL on my Vaio 13.3 widescreen laptop. (If you had the misfortune to watch Pink Floyd on MTV or VH1 you know exactly what I mean.) AOL had the great good sense to let the music speak for itself and keep the commercial messages to a bare minimum. It even looked pretty decent in full-screen mode.
As AOL programming chief Jim Bankoff promised, I effortlessly switched between concerts for hours essentially piecing together my own experience. The experience wasn’t flawless; the names of performers and the performances I actually ended up with didn’t always match plus I was forced to IE because it didn’t work in Firefox. But that’s small compared to what I got out of the experience.
By late afternoon, AOL was reporting more than 5 million page views and more than 150,000 simultaneous video streams. That latter sounds a little low to me. I’m sure we’ll have more complete stats in the next day or so. I also expect the on-demand traffic to be intense over the next six weeks as people seek out performances they missed or want to relive. That’s AOL’s next test.
Did it up the AOL cool quotient? It should have given it quite a boost. Will the expense and effort translate into a successful launch for AOL on the web? That remains to be seen.
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