Live Earth may set new stage for Web viewing

By Yinka Adegoke

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Live Earth event on Saturday is set to reach millions more people than previous global productions with its reach boosted by the fast-growing power of Web video sharing and social networks.

Organizers estimate television broadcasts of the live concerts staged to raise awareness about climate change will be available to up to 2 billion people although there is no estimate of how many people will actually watch the shows.

But that viewership may be trumped online where a generation hooked to social networks like MySpace and video site YouTube share ideas, photos and videos with their peers.

"Users can create their own program from all the show assets from around the world," said Kevin Wall, Live Earth founder and CEO of Control Room which is producing the shows.

"They're going to be able to share those experiences in a way that's never ever been done in history."

The global Live 8 concert to fight poverty in 2005 was the first major multi-venue event successfully streamed live with Time Warner Inc.'s AOL portal on the Web.

But Control Room, which produced Live 8, found it was the on-demand streams days after the event which had the most impact, especially after clips were passed round by e-mail.

Live 8 was streamed by users over 100 million times in six weeks. Live Earth is expected to be three times bigger.  Continued...