When Al Gore’s series of Live Earth concerts kick off tomorrow, all eyes (on the net at least) will be on MSN. In partnership with Control Room, Microsoft has secured the exclusive Internet streaming rights in 24 countries, and is predicted to pull in 500 million visitors to their dedicated Live Earth site.

Not only is MSN dishing out coverage to more countries than Live8, the last big multinational fund-raising concert, but technically this is also a far more ambitious affair. As well as picking from eight simultaneous streams from various concerts around the globe, visitors to the site will have the option to watch on-demand, as well as — once the event has concluded — search archives by location, artist and song performance.

AOL’s coverage of Live8 was applauded by critics, who accused the TV networks of taking too many commercial breaks and missing key performances.

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Internet TV service, Babelgum, has announced that former Vodafone Global Director of Networks and Service Platforms, Valerio Zingarelli, has been appointed CEO. Zingarelli takes over from co-founder, Erik Lumer, who will remain with the company to focus on “strategic product development”. As part of the announcement, Babelgum also laid out its plans for the next nine to twelve months in which the company will concentrate on acquiring more content, so as to grow its user-base and begin to attract advertisers. Continue reading »

We’re all familiar with the Hollywood-machine consigning movies to the ‘straight to video’ market, bypassing a theatrical release altogether. This week, MGM began to experiment with a new category: straight to download — with “A Dog’s Breakfast”, directed by David Hewlett (star of the sci-fi series, “Stargate Atlantis”), making its debut on Apple’s iTunes and Amazon’s Unbox.

Even though the movie is a low-budget affair (presenting little risk to MGM) it seems that the film’s distribution strategy is being driven by the potential to appeal to an existing Stargate fan-base. Continue reading »

Jaman, which sells high definition movie downloads (rental and to-own), has announced that it will soon be releasing a plug-in for the AppleTV. With the software installed, Jaman movies will appear as a new menu option alongside existing content choices, which include television shows and movies downloaded via Apple’s own iTunes store. Although hackers have already had success adding new features to Apple’s set-top-box, this is the first known effort by a commercial company aiming to plug their service into the device to create a level playing field with Apple’s own content offerings. Continue reading »