Live 8 a huge success...except on TV

It was an excellent concert. It's just too bad you couldn't tell that from the web and TV coverage of the event.

MTV carried little to nothing live. Everything was on tape delay and even then songs were not played in their entirety. The hosts were, for the most part, unnecessary and would often serve only to recap things they were just going to show you in a minute anyway.

The Snoop Dogg performance was bowdlerized badly. It was show at least twice and both times it appeared that only half of the swears that Snoop dropped were muted. Why bother half-assed, MTV? It's called video tape. If you were tape delaying everything, you can do that in the production truck before you sent it out...and when you make a mistake, do it again for the replay.

The AOL stuff wasn't much better. Even with a broadband connection, I couldn't get the video to work in either IE or Firefox. The audio worked in IE, but sounded so tinny and distant that I gave up. Apparently, though most others were able to get through and had a good result. It's a shame that AOL's website isn't yet compatible with Firefox, though. The error message said it will be sometime this month.

The highlight show on ABC was much better. It was taste of everything that went on today throughout the world with no interruptions. They play the whole song, then move to another performance somewhere else. It's what MTV's coverage should have been.

Still, the message that was supposed to get across was made and very powerfully at times. That's what it was all about.