July 8, 2007

Live Earth: Web Hit, TV Miss

By Shirley Brady

While they may not have stopped global warming, organizers hoping for 2 billion global viewers (on-air and online) for Saturday's Live Earth: Concerts for a Climate in Crisis broke one record — for online streaming of a concert event.

MSN tallied 8 million viewers worldwide and more than 15 million video streams for its dedicated live earth Webcast channel, LiveEarth.msn.com, on Saturday. With more than 30 million live and on demand streams of its Live Earth content delivered through today, MSN estimates it set a record for the most simultaneous viewers of any online concert or entertainment event ever.

The U.K. concert at Wembley Stadium was MSN's most watched individual live stream, and peak simultaneous viewership of 237,000 (another Web record) occurred during Madonna's closing performance in London.

MSN's Live Earth website will continue serving on-demand footage of all performances—along with artist interviews, backstage footage and additional video highlights—from all eight official concerts at LiveEarth.MSN.com for several weeks.

The viewership wasn't so hot on the TV side, where NBC and its family of networks shared the concerts' feeds in the U.S. NBC’s three-hour Live Earth special on Saturday averaged a 0.9 adults 18-49 rating, about 18% below the timeslot average for reruns of America’s Got Talent and Medium a week earlier, according to preliminary overnight ratings data from Nielsen.

NBC also finished last among adults 18-49 and total viewers for the night, averaging only 2.7 million in the latter. Nielsen overnight ratings (reports Media Life and the Hollywood Reporter) show Saturday's TV winner was CBS, which averaged 5.2 million viewers in primetime.

NBCU's U.S. cable network ratings for the event were similarly lackluster, with Nielsen estimates indicating more than 19 million people watched some portion of Live Earth coverage on NBC or its sister networks, including Bravo and CNBC. As Reuters points out, "that figure counts anyone who watched for at least six minutes and is thus considered a less meaningful audience measure than average viewership."

Bravo announced it attracted nearly 8 million (unduplicated) total viewers during its almost 18-hour Live Earth marathon Saturday. Its coverage averaged 740,000 viewers, the biggest Saturday audience in the network's history.

U.K. TV ratings for the event were also disappointing, where the BBC's coverage of the Live Earth concert at London's Wembley Stadium, leading up to Madonna's finale, averaged 3.1 million viewers, compared with 11.4 million for the Diana concert tribute.

NBC and its cable networks televised different slices of the Live Earth concerts leading up to (and following) NBC's primetime broadcast in the U.S.:

• For viewers with HDTV sets, Universal HD kicked off NBCU's coverage at 4am through to 2am Sunday with live coverage and highlights, the only U.S. network to carry the event in HD. Featured performers: The Beastie Boys, Ludacris, Kanye West, Kelly Clarkson, Bon Jovi, Madonna, The Police, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Melissa Etheridge, Dave Matthews Band, The Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, Duran Duran, Akon, AFI, Paolo Nutini, KT Tunstall and more.

• Sundance Channel, which NBCU co-owns, carried live feeds of the concerts plus highlights from 4am-2am Sunday in standard definition.

• Bravo kicked in at 9am ET and ran through to 3am Sunday, offering live coverage from the U.S. Live Earth concert at Giants stadium in New Jersey plus "best of" highlights from the global concerts. Hosted by former MTV VJs Karen Duffy and Dave Holmes and VH1's Aamer Haleem.

• MSNBC offered continuous coverage from 8am-4pm Saturday. MSNBC broadcast highlights from the global concerts throughout the day with live reports from the concerts in New York and London.

• CNBC's coverage ran seven hours from 8am-2am Sunday.

• Telemundo televised an hour-long special in Spanish at 7pm Saturday featuring Latin performers including Shakira, Mana and Enrique Iglesias.

• mun2, Telemundo's youth-skewing cable net, covered Live Earth in a two-hour special from 5pm-7pm.

• NBC's primetime coverage (8pm-11pm): highlights of performances from around the world, including live coverage of the U.S. concert at Giants Stadium. Hosted by Today's Ann Curry with another former MTV host, Carson Daly.

Beyond NBCU, MTV supported Live Earth across its global networks and websites including a dedicated website, LiveEarth.mtv.com.

Live Earth co-organizer (and former U.S. vice president) Al Gore's Current TV will continue to support Live Earth with a :60 Seconds to Save the Earth contest soliciting user-generated PSAs on climate change through Sept. 12th; Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection is co-sponsoring.