• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 1, 2005

Music fans who miss the Live8 music concert on July 2 won't have to wait to view it until the DVD comes out, thanks to the Web. On Tuesday, the same day that Live 8 organizer Bob Geldof announced the concert, America Online said it intends to stream the event live and offer it on demand for around six weeks afterwards. AOL will make the streams available Web-wide, to non-subscribers as well as members, said Jim Bankoff, executive vice president for programming and products at AOL.

Live 8, a sequel to 1985's Live Aid, will take place in five cities: Philadelphia, London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome. The concerts, which will take place six days before the G8 conference in Scotland, are designed to raise awareness of global poverty. So far, more than 50 musicians and groups have confirmed that they will appear, including Madonna, U2, Elton John, Paul McCartney, and P. Diddy.

AOL intends to also offer a plethora of related online features, including blogs, interviews with musicians, and public service announcements, said Bankoff. AOL also will make available streams of a series of short films related to global poverty that screenwriter Richard Curtis ("Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill") is developing.

AOL hadn't tried to line up any marketing sponsors before Tuesday's announcement, but will attempt to do so now, Bankoff said.

Bankoff said he anticipates Live 8 will draw large numbers of online viewers. "We expect it to be one of our largest, if not our largest, streaming event," he said. The most popular live music event at AOL to date was a May 9 concert by the Dave Matthews Band that was streamed almost half a million times in 24 hours. Additionally, this year's Super Bowl ads were streamed more than 22 million times in 10 days.

Bankoff added that many AOL viewers will be interested in streaming the event--now estimated to take six hours--after the fact, rather than while it's going on, when it will be available on television. "Generally, what we find is that the on-demand nature of the content is the real power of it," he said.

AOL intends to present the on-demand streams into "digestible" chapters; while the company hasn't determined the exact length, Bankoff said it would probably be closer to 15 minutes than an hour.