Review: Youtube Live - 15,000,000 viewers and some very mixed messages
Tonight Youtube did something daring; they put on a 90 minute event and broadcasted it live; filled with guests and acts relevent to the popular video community site.
The line-up looked promising, dotted with a list of famous people who could attribute their fame (or notoriety in some cases) to Youtube. Acts such as Chad Vader, Will It Blend and Mythbusters proved to be the big names and therefore drew a huge audience. The 90 minute show has just ended, with YoutubeLive have had nearly 15 million channel views, gained 103,000 subscribers and received more than 91,000 comments.
A strong start
Katy Perry acted as a marvelous introduction to the show and things moved in a good direction. Beardyman brought his trademark beatboxing to the stage and made everyone watching realise quite how 2003 beatboxing has become; even the use of live-multi-track-mixing didn't rescue this plucky fellow Brit from an apathetic crowd. The list of guests and links was bizarre at best; pseudo famous video-bloggers, each more camp than the last adding very little variety to the event.
A slow descent into awkwardness, boredom, embarrassment and shameless plugging
This is to be expected with 'the first' of anything, but all of the links felt forced like amateur pantomime and while watching Joe Satriani play with Youtube-guitar-legend FunTwo was excellent, the introduction to it was a forced plug of Guitar Hero (one of the sponsors for the night). From here on it became all too obvious quite how much product placement was going on...
The ominous abundance of ethnic diversity in the acts raised an eyebrow or two, like Youtube was trying to make some form of statement about unity or something; whereas any heartfelt message would be lost because it was forcibly juxtaposed with Will It Blend destroying Chad Vader's broom.
Apalling talent brought the event down
Some of the acts were fantastic; the dancers especially. However the musical acts were almost all out of key and too long; after all there's only so long you can hear Will.I.Am "singing" a bad song out of tune. I'm not entirely sure who vetted the musical acts for tonight - I assume none of them were paid - but the majority (apart from Katy Perry and the lad who played the piano) were worse than you'll ever see on TV.
Anti-intellectualism came hand-in-hand with ethnic diversity
Entirely unintentionally, Youtube promoted a disproportionate amount of ethnic diversity throughout the show which normally wouldn't be an issue, but when the musical acts are either out of key, rapping about anti-intellectualism or reading the autocue worse than the average 8 year old, it seems to have been counter productive.
At face value, Youtube Live was a glaring success but upon reflection I found it hard to recall any moments of real enjoyment. Even the Mythbusters segment was flawed and dragged well beyond the point of interest - the perils of live streaming I guess.
Conclusion
A good effort, but in trying to re-emphasise their own significance Youtube have shown their "most prized users" to be little more than frothy, camp and unable to handle circumstances beyond their own webcam. Segments such as "Happy Tree Friends" which would normally delight were cut far too short, whereas Akon was allowed a good 5 minutes to ply his tiresome trade against a worryingly enthusiastic audience. I can only assume drinks were spiked because he was just awful...
Maybe next time Youtube, we could focus a little more on the middle class white people who constitute a massive majority of your audience, rather than the lowest common denominator.
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