Perhaps it’s because watching TV isn’t a carbon-neutral activity, or perhaps those Fourth of July hangovers were especially nasty this year, but Saturday’s Live Earth broadcast on NBC was the lowest-rated programming of all four major networks. The Washington Post reports that nearly twice as many people watched a repeat of ‘America’s Most Wanted,’ and even ‘Cops’ beat out the “historic” concert.
Bravo’s day-long coverage of the event fared a little better, with double the usual amount of viewers for a Saturday (‘Project Runway’ marathons don’t stay fascinating forever, y’know). And MSN, the exclusive online partner for the concert, reported to AdAge that 10 million video streams were started the day of the concert. While that number doesn’t necessarily translate into 10 million viewers, the implication may be more than a little startling for NBC.
What this means for anyone, Al Gore or the television networks, is unclear. It’s been a while since there was any live concert so major that the entire world had to stop and pay attention, and spending a summer evening indoors watching a concert full of acts you probably don’t like anyway isn’t exactly the most important thing you can do to stop global warming. Plus, concert footage is better suited to internet viewing than, say, an episode of ‘The Office,’ so it’s no surprise that viewers chose to get their content in snippets online rather than sit around waiting for Bono to finally show up.
It’s depressing, though, that the low network numbers will probably peg the Live Earth concerts as a failure, and let the issue they were trying to address go once again ignored. Not because of some global conspiracy to turn Al Gore into a fraud and bake the earth to a crisp or anything, but because the television industry still has not figured out how to deal with internet broadcasts in any meaningful way, no one will remember that anyone watched Live Earth at all. And that’s even more shameful than the fact that more people watched a rerun of ‘Cops’; seriously, come on people.
