The Stones Jam Live On MBONE!

The Rolling Stones, Thinking Pictures and Sun Microsystems are proud to report that the first ever live multicast of a major rock band's performance on the Internet was a smashing success. Other bands had had cool broadcasts of live shows on the MBONE in the past, but ?who? were they? Find out on IUMA.

The Rolling Stones multicast 25 minutes of their Dallas Cotton Bowl concert live over the internet MBONE on November 18th as promotion for their Pay-Per-View offer to North America on November 25th. We asked the Stones for 20-30 minutes of their concert so that the multicast would not severely affect net traffic. The multicast will be repeated a few times throught this next week as permitted by all of you out in cyberspace.

The MBONE Broadcast began on Friday November 18th 10:00pmEST after a an unannounced renegade warmup set by an obscure and very bad band of furry Palo Alto Geeks. They touted that this was the first ever warmup set by a band in a different city than the headliner. They started their warmup set at 9:30EST just as we were about to do our final set of broadcast tests before the do or die live video feed came via satellite from the Cotton Bowl so we fully agreed when they did crufty durges like "I'm an asshole." and "We don't care."

At 10:00pm, we took the first half hour to share some new interviews and never seen before backstage stuff with all the listeners. Then we broadcast the "Love is Strong" video followed by the "Out of Tears" video. The band took the stage at 10:32EST and the concert began. The Stones started with their customary opening three "Not Fade Away", "Tumblin Dice" and "You Got Me Rockin" then Mick gave a special address to our MBONE listeners. He said something like:

"I wanna say a special welcome to everyone thats uh... climbed into the Internet tonight and uh... has got into the MBONE and I hope it doesn't all collapse!"

Keith then started the guitars for an awesome version of "Shattered", followed by "Rocks Off". After the concert the buzz was tremendous. The audio program (VAT) still showed (60k) all of those sites that had tuned in to our broadcast. The vat window needed to be resized large because there were so many listeners that at the default size, the vat window was a blur. The Sexually Tranmitted Diseases came back on for a followup acoustic set, much much much worse than the first, because they covered campy folk songs that we all recognized from numerous acid trips around the fires at Grateful Dead parking lot parties, and Washington Square Park furry troll guitar singalong sessions. YUCK!

For details on:

How to set up your host (Workstation) to receive the MBONE recasts