On October 10, 2001, the world was still in shock the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and all the artists in the United States had canceled concerts for fear of attacks. All but one band, U2: that night they performed at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana.
It was not the most important stage of the Elevation Tour, and above all it had the aim of giving hope back after the terror of 9/11, but the Irish band was also making history in the digital revolution. The history of live streaming.
The audience probably didn’t even know it, but at some point they all did: after 51 minutes of concert, before attacking a new song, Bono, who was a demigod at the time, went twice to say something in the ear of Edge, or David Howell Evans, the guitarist of the group, who also answered in his ear. And then Bono wiped away the sweat, took a sip of water from a bottle of a fan in the front row, and to the crowd he said: “Lately Edge has been spending a lot of time on the Internet … and so today he organized this concert on the web … and when I asked him how many people are watching him I he replied that it was the whole universe. And so this afternoon I found out that the whole universe is here with us at Notre Dame. “
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But this is not just the story of a U2 concert; is the story of how a group of Italians, between Cagliari, Pisa and Rome, did the enterprise to show for the first time a concert via the Web with excellent quality to about 500 thousand people simultaneously, from Brazil to Japan. It was not the first concert ever to go streaming: as early as 1994 the Rolling Stones had done so using the rudimentary infrastructure of I seewhich at the time only connected a dozen universities and research centers, and the quality of the 7 minutes transmitted on the Web was really bad.
Then it was a long trade war started between Microsoft and Real Networks to develop the best technological solution with ups and downs: in 1998 Microsoft had scored a great blow by broadcasting the testimony of US President Bill Clinton live on the Weboverwhelmed by the scandal of an intern.
The following year, Victoria’s Secret was the first fashion company to broadcast a show live on the Web, but the image was as small as a postage stamp and all grainy. The road, however, was marked: Bill Gates (ovviamente in streaming) announced that web video and audio would be the next great digital revolution. You were right, and on November 29, 2000, Microsoft released a live webcast of a short Madonna concert in London: 3,500 people in a theater, but 9 million connected, a triumph that eclipsed the show, also via the Web, by Paul McCartney from Liverpool the year before. In fact, many tried to connect with Madonna’s concert in vain. As one of the Microsoft executives said, “our site worked perfectly, but some connectivity providers failed to deliver images due to too many requests.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTskvqe28Cg
In short: if the U2 concert was not the first broadcast via the Web, it was the first broadcast in high quality and with half a million people connected at the same time. There was an Italian company behind that success. There was Tiscali. Today it may seem crazy, but at the time Sardinia was one of the outposts where the Internet was built. It had been since Nichi Grauso had founded Video On Line, with the idea of bringing the Internet to everyone: it had a quick, dazzling and ephemeral success, but from that experience, thanks to Renato Soru, Tiscali was born, which at a certain point came to be worth more than Fiat. Apart from evaluations, Tiscali was then an extraordinary catalyst for talents and projects. A startup with a global ambition.
But it’s time to introduce the first protagonist of this story, who in fact is not an Italian. Although he has lived in Italy ever since. In short, the man who had the idea of the concert and who made the deal with U2 was Jonathan Brownstein, for all Jon, born in Buffalo, raised in Boston; a scholarship had brought him to Italy, where he joined Grauso’s team and then Soru’s. “I was the head of a business unit responsible for the international distribution of Tiscali Free Net in the most widespread and efficient way possible: we put subscriptions everywhere, following the school of Nichi Grauso who distributed his a Video On Line with the disk in the Topolino magazine and in all the Italian newspapers and weeklies; years later, we continued, putting Tiscali in Nike shoes, with the Kinder egg, in all possible computers “.
One day in 2000, Tiscali had made one of the most important purchases in history, he had bought World On Line, becoming a very important international Internet operator present in 15 countries and with over 8 million users: “With the acquisition of World On Line, all the marketing contracts made by the Dutch company had also been acquired. There were many very important contracts on the long list. In a meeting with Mario Mariani where we reviewed the contracts, I saw for example the sponsorship contract of Formula 1 with BAR and many contracts with the music star system such as Sting, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan and U2. The contracts were what I would call Internet days contracts, mind-boggling figures with a vague economic sense. In short, World On Line paid 6 zero figures for pure brand equity, with the aim of design, build and host the sites of these artists; a huge cost for us, without a real counterpart of image. Mario and I felt the urge to take these contracts in hand and try to close them early or rebalance them to at least get some visibility. We started with the contract we cared about the most: we took a plane to Dublin with a stop at Clarenc, the U2 hotel, and we met the management (Trevor Bowen). We explained our point of view, that we were islanders like them, that we had inherited this contract and that we needed a hand to rebalance it. We were just asking for a little gratitude that we built and hosted their site without even a mention of our company. ‘So guys, what do you want, how can we help you, Trevor told us, in the U2 office temple in Dublin. ‘Trevor, Microsoft did the Madonna concert 6 months ago, they said they had 500,000 users, but the quality was very bad and we find it hard to believe in this number. We can do a live concert, distributed all over the world at very high quality. The first live webcast, distributed worldwide through all our countries and together with Real Networks and the alliance of which Tiscali is a part, the Global Internet Alliance. We can build a world wide network to stream at high quality and also offer load balancing solutions to improve the quality of live streaming video distribution ‘”.
This they told him. But the answer was that an estimated $ 10 million DVD was coming out and a live Web would hurt it. It was over. In the evening though in a Dublin pub they met Adam Clayton, the bass player, and the negotiation randomly restarted, coming to directly involve The Edge, who at the time sat on the board of the Media Lab at MIT in Boston, one of the vanguards of the digital revolution. “The negotiation was long and I don’t know how we managed to convince the band, but after a couple of months a signed contract came in to stream U2 for free, in exchange for the promotion we gave them instead of the 10 million dollars that we had. they asked us at the beginning. Thanks Edge! And Thanks to Renato Soru for teaching us to believe in the impossible “.
At that point the concert production starts. The heads of Real Networks and all the participants of the Global Internet Alliance are involved to whom the concert is literally given away. For bear the coststhe advertising agency of Tiscali (led by Davide Mondo and Massimo Crotti) would have found a sponsor: “We tested the first advertising video instream inserted in a live concert distributed with a syndication network like this important. I think it was the first advertising investment for a 6-zero video instream! “.
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Il second protagonist of this story is called Domenico Datois in Pisa, the real capital of the Italian Internet, where at the time with Giuseppe Attardi and Antonio Gulli he had founded a company, Ideare, which Tiscali had acquired in 2000. “We were involved because U2 wanted to create a chat to interact with fans before and after the concert: hearing opinions on the performance, answering questions, etc. At the time we were among the few who had chat technology capable of supporting their request for up to 10,000 simultaneous users connected by the whole world. ”The poster of the event stood out the promise of being able to chat with U2 in person: “We don’t know if Adam, Larry, Edge or Bono will be on the other side, but some of them will be chatting to answer your questions.” It was 2001, and for the times it was revolutionary.
Il third protagonist of the story he is in Rome, he is called Peter Kruger: he had launched a company to enter the streaming market, Soru had acquired it by asking Kruger to move to Cagliari, but he had obtained permission to stay in Rome to manage a team dedicated to the development of audio-video services on the Internet. Kruger remembers: “In addition to assisting in the technical operations of live streaming, the team created the Tiscali Video and Tiscali Broadband services, the first true platform in the world for paid video on demand movies. Years before Netflix or Disney Plus became common names in the way we consume series and films, Tiscali had closed an agreement for the use of the Cecchi Gori library, then one of the largest in the world. The operation made dozens of films accessible both in streaming and in download throughout the country, using state-of-the-art geolocation and digital rights management systems; and obviously by exploiting the enormous transport capacity of the Tiscali network backbones, then among the largest in Europe “.
But let’s go back to the U2 concert in memory of Brownstein: “It was up to Peter Kruger and the technical team to set up a video streaming network and then share it with all our countries thanks to the work of Andrea Turno as coordinator. The technological challenge was unprecedented. Never has there been a video stream broadcast on so many and different networks around the world. The main obstacle was the harmonization of formats and protocols across very different server infrastructures. The original video feed, broadcast via satellite, was sometimes streamed to the various partners’ server farms. But, for most of the cases, the origin of the stream started directly from Cagliari to be then repaid on the CDN of partners around the world, from Brazil to Japan. And, obviously, under the careful management of Antonio Pittalis and the other expert system operators of Salvatore Pulvirenti’s team, the stream was also transmitted through the Tiscali network, which, at the time, had one of the largest infrastructures in Europe. Incredibly, despite this vast complexity, the technical structures of Tiscali, scattered between Cagliari, Pisa and Rome, managed to coordinate perfectly with the various partners, through virtually every possible time zone, and the transmission ended up flowing smoothly through all networks, reaching virtually every corner of the planet. For the time, it was quite astonishing ”.
Stunning to discover how far ahead we were in the digital revolution in this country, before stopping.