• Reuters, Monday, July 9, 2007 12:53 PM

Saturday's Live Earth concert, Webcast on MSN, broke records, attracting the largest online audience for an entertainment show by generating more than 9 million streams. The previous record was held by the 2005 Live 8 concert to fight poverty, Webcast on Time Warner's AOL, reaching 5 million Web users-which is not the total number of streams.

MSN's number points to the total number of times the event was logged into; this does not reflect the number of unique users. As Microsoft said in its statement, a Web user could have viewed clips of the two-day event several times. AOL did not reveal how many times Live 8 was streamed during the show, though it did say that in the six weeks following the event, the show was streamed more than 100 million times.

Control Room, the company that produced the Webcasts for both events, said Live 8 had the biggest impact in the days following the event, when users could stream clips on demand. Email was one of the biggest distribution methods. The company expects Live Earth to generate more than 80% of its total viewership in the days after the event, making it three times bigger than Live 8.

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