Electric Proms

I’m loving the BBC’s Electric Proms. I was half-tempted to get a ticket to something when I heard the line-up, but I just had to make do with the red button and broadband.

I’m watching “Kaiser Chiefs via David Arnold” on my laptop at the moment. I think they mean ”...with David Arnold”, but never mind. It’s still the biggest new British rock band and the composer of the James Bond films.

Needless to say, it sounds like Kaiser Chiefs mixed with a Bond film, and it’s all the better for it.

Bloc Party ”...via the Wessex Singers” wasn’t quite such a success. Some of the singers were desperately clinging to their ear-pieces, and the poor tuning suggested they couldn’t really hear what was going on.

Mark Ronson was really good, with a really great version of Back to Black.

I’ve also just discovered the BBC’s iPlayer. When I say ‘discovered’, what I mean is, I finally got it working after fiddling with my laptop’s DRM controls. If it takes me an hour to fix, I dread to think how many casual users are going to give up before getting that far.

Once it’s working, it’s alright. Very quick and great video quality. But having to switch to Internet Explorer is doing my head in, and the Library keeps going bananas. I hope they fix these glitches before promoting it. Compared with the simplicity of YouTube, it’s a joke.

But it’s weird… the BBC clearly have the online rights to the Electric Proms gigs. I mean, I’m watching it now. Yet it’s not on the iPlayer – you have to open an Electric Proms player. The iPlayer only has the BBC Two edited highlights, which isn’t much.

It all adds up to some unjoined-up thinking.

Someone’s still stuck in a linear, channel-based world, where if it’s not on one of the terrestrial networks, it doesn’t exist.

Hopefully they’ll rectify this by the time it comes out of Beta around Christmas. Especially if the content’s half as good as the Proms.

: 29 Oct 2007 17:05 |  Tags: BBC Bloc Party Electric Proms Kaiser Chiefs Music Sigur Ros |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem