The prospect of establishing a profitable market for broadband content came a step closer last week with the news that Elton John was to team up with the Microsoft Network (MSN) to webcast a concert in Turkey.
In what could prove to be the biggest music event on the net this year, Elton John will play at the 2,500-year-old amphitheatre in Ephesus, where the Apostle Paul preached in the 1st century. The webcast will be only available to users with high-speed broadband access. The 90-minute concert will be made available at 100k and 300k and priced at £7 and £10 respectively. It is believed to be the first global pay-per-view concert on the net.
The event follows last year's record-breaking Madonna concert, which saw more than 10 million users view the show over a two-week period. Then, many users experienced severe delays or were denied access during the concert at London's Brixton Acadamy. This time, to ensure that a paying audience will receive an uninterrupted performance, MSN say it will limit the audience to 130,000, available on a first-come, first-served basis.
"To get video quality pictures and CD quality sound you need a broadband connection," explains Jeff Sutton, director of MSN.co.uk. "Until now all our webcasts have been free and they've been great for building an audience. But this is an opportunity to build on that and set the stage for premium services and pay-per-view."
MSN is looking at a number of sporting events for pay-per-view and there is a strong likelihood that the Elton John webcast will be repeated in September when the singer plays in front of the Great Wall of China.
Sir Elton - the UK's highest-paid star - will receive an undisclosed share from an estimated £1m. He will perform songs from his forthcoming album, Songs From the West Coast.
MSN will host the event, but delivery of the concert to an internet audience will be performed by MediaWave, the Derby-based company that encoded and distributed the Madonna gig. MediaWave has also built a pay-per-view engine that can handle 15-20,000 transactions per hour.
"This is the first time we've used the network in anger," says Chris Frampton of Media Wave. "We used the Madonna concert to test out as many players, partners and ISPs as we could. We wanted to see who had the capacity and who could deliver.
"We've developed a global delivery mechanism that hooks into every major internet backbone. With satellite, the cost is colossal and it's time-based. This is going out live once and then the show will be on demand for the following week."
Another reason for restricting the concert is to encourage take-up of broadband. If Sky had not bought the rights to Premiership football, who would have satellite TV today?
"If you keep providing stuff at dial-up levels, there is never going to be an incentive either for the broadcasters to move up towards the higher technology or for users to buy into broadband," says Frampton. According to a recent survey by NetValue, only one in 32 UK homes has broadband access.
But will companies like MSN be able to establish a paying audience used to seeing such concerts through their televisions?
The major advantage of showing a concert on the web is cost. It is far cheaper to reach a global audience via the net than on satellite tele vision. The net also comes without scheduling problems.
Also, for the Madonna gig, MSN unleashed one of the biggest marketing campaigns the net had seen. The company promoted that concert to 75 million users of MSN Hotmail in 17 languages. Elton John's concert will see a similar campaign.
The production company Done and Dusted, which produced the Madonna concert and this year's webcast of the Brit Awards, will film the gig. The company plans to offer a number of interactive packages including multi-camera options before and after the gig and backstage interviews.
"Madonna opened the world's eyes to the fact that you could have an enormous audience online," says Paul Morrison, the company's managing director.
