Control Room is taking music content and handing control over to you.
The company announced a multiyear, global live content distribution agreement with MSN and will provide live music content for MSN users to stream or view on-demand.
Control Room, formerly Network Live, used to have a partnership with AOL, but it ended after 14 months and 59 live webcast concerts. So the company changed its name and now works with Microsoft.
As part of the deal, Microsoft can stream the
Control Room content to other platforms, including Xbox Live, MSN
Messenger, Microsoft Windows Media Player and Windows XP Media Center
Edition.
John Legend will start the show with an exclusive
performance from the Royal Albert Hall in London on Oct. 2.
Microsoft said it plans to monetize the Control Room partnership with
display, text and streaming video advertisements.
But AOL Vice President Erik Flannigan said there’s a thing about even
the best laid plans.
AOL partnered with the company now known as Control Room, concert
promoter AEG and XM satellite radio in 2005.
And for just over a year, the partnership produced some “great
concerts,” Flannigan said.
“But it turned out that the model they were trying to get through the
labels and through the artists was much more challenging than they
imagined,” Flannigan told internetnews.com.
He said that dealing with all the licensing issues of a live show
simply became unmanageable.
So what does MSN know that AOL doesn’t about how to deal with the
labels and the artists?
A Microsoft spokesperson wouldn’t comment on the issue.
“I think there are some different ways other than rolling your trucks
out to a venue to do concert programming that’s more compelling,
frankly, than the straightforward webcast,” Flannigan said.
Microsoft hopes its MSN users will feel differently when the Control
Room trucks will roll too the Royal Albert Hall
