I watched quite a bit of the Live Earth concert at Wembley Stadium yesterday.

What a great line-up of singers and music for a spectacular event! Not only in London but also in eight other cities around the world.

For me, the absolute highlight of the London gig was Madonna, the closing act of the concert there. What a performance. Now that was entertainment!

You can see the concert, too, as a streaming video recording via MSN is now available, not only from London but also all the other events (note you’ll need to use Internet Explorer to view any of these). And if you’re in the UK, you can watch recordings of the complete BBC1 TV broadcast during the next seven days.

And it looks like a significant milestone has been reached with live video streaming:

[...] As of 3:00 p.m. EDT [on July 7], MSN had received a total of more than 10 million video streams and has the most simultaneous viewers of any online concert ever. Viewers worldwide have already watched the Live Earth concerts via the live webcast, and the LiveEarth.MSN.com audience will only increase. On-demand footage of all performances, along with artist interviews, backstage footage, easy searching capabilities for specific songs, artists and more, will be available from all eight official concerts at LiveEarth.MSN.com for the next several weeks.

So a tremendous day of global entertainment. But will it make any difference to what people think and do about climate change?

If you pay attention to the multitude of critical voices, not much. Negative commentary ranges from accusations that the concerts themselves contribute to global warming to criticism of Madonna’s green credentials.

While I don’t believe that the events will produce a sudden change in overall attitudes to environmental concerns, I do believe that these events do raise awareness of the issues. Whether people choose to act on that raised awareness is a different matter.

Maybe that’s the best expectation from the live concerts.

Where it gets interesting is what looks likely to happen in the days and weeks following yesterday’s events as people share, create and mashup their own content from the digital content that’s openly available.

From a Reuters report on Friday:

“Users can create their own program from all the show assets from around the world,” said Kevin Wall, Live Earth founder and CEO of Control Room which is producing the shows. “They’re going to be able to share those experiences in a way that’s never ever been done in history.”

[...] In the age of Google Inc.’s YouTube, MSN and Control Room realize that providing technology that helps friends share clips of their favorite Live Earth moments on other sites will be even more important than the live event. “When you think about the control we’ve given the user, you could put together your own Live Earth show after the event,” said Joanne Bradford, chief media officer at MSN.

Organizers expect more than 80 percent of the viewership will be on-demand in the days following the July 7 event.

[...] a user could add a video clip of Madonna performing her specially penned song ’Hey You’ to a blog or social network page and add a feature allowing visitors to buy a download with proceeds going to an environmental cause. That flexibility has become possible with the artists agreeing to give up their rights without charge for the cause.

Though details are still being finalized, Wall expects Live Earth to have rights to show the clips for months afterwards.

Now that’s how to create and raise awareness on a global scale – enable it from the grass roots.

If you want to learn about the issues Live Earth is promoting, you’ll find all you need at the Live Earth website.

Related post:

• Understanding climate change and what to do about it