As a matter of fact it did work out just fine.

Regards,

Jung

Tapping on the microphone
 

Originally Posted by docdtv:
But what if you can't get even 2,500 people together at the same time in the biggest, richest French city in the world...

Indeed, that is just my point! What's new now is that sending a high-quality 3D video link, and even getting a video link back costs a pittance, even when paid for with a small venue audience. The small venue business need no longer be as painful. That's why I am polling people to see how much they'd pay.

And as far as Americans, say in the Bos-Wash corridor, are concerned, consider this. The cost in money and time of traveling round-trip to France or Israel or even just Monterey in Mexico might be so prohibitive that they would never attend a live Alizée event in any of those places. But maybe one could gather 250 of them at a theater in New York City, and entertaining them live could actually be made lucrative enough to Alizée, because she could do the show from her home town.

P.S. Don't ask ME why people like live shows. Just as I would rather read a published book than its first draft, I would rather watch the En Concert video than attend a live concert, in person or remotely, even cost and convenience aside. When compelled to offer my best rationales for the appeal of live concerts to others, here is what I come up with.
1. You get to share time (and maybe even body fluids) with other fans.
2. You get to "touch" the performers with your voice and placard, if not with your hand.
3. You get to see if the performers make mistakes (curiosity or Schadenfreude?)
4. You get to escape the "psychological shadow" of your usual dwellings and its denizens.
5. In the old days, video quality (noise, resolution) fell far short of a good theater seat. Some poor souls still haven't seen modern displays and far more are unwilling to pay for the improvement, which is why not everything mediated is shot at the technology frontier. (Note: As a student, I listened to all my music through a telephone speakerphone meant for a 3KHz bandwidth signal, rather than spend money on even a simple "decent" speaker.)

You will note the type of event I posit here is almost as much a meeting as a concert. (i.e. with a greatly enhanced rationale 2 noted above.) That adds a dimension to its appeal, potentially increasing the admission price people will pay, while reducing the professional demands on the performer.

^. ^. ^. ^.
small venues are far better than large scale shows. closer to the artist.

Jesus Christ doc.. where do you come up with these things?? hahahaa!! If only.. :)

The implausible often becomes the everyday over time
 

Since at least the 1936 Charlie Chaplain film Modern Times, the general public has looked to a future where, for good or ill, video-mediated telepresence would achieve what the half-millennium-old optical telescope never could. One day, the dreamers said, we would have enough channel capacity in our public telecom network to make videoconferencing more than just the one-time high-tech demo which Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover took part in way back in 1927.

When the semiconductor laser and low-loss optical fiber were developed in the late 20th century, it was no longer fanciful to say the day of enough cheap trunk bandwidth would surely come. The mass deployment of cable TV made the simplicity of a last-mile wired connection obvious. And then exploding microprocessor power offered the frosting of all but free real-time data compression as well.

Just as we were waiting for the videoconferencing explosion to hit, a funny thing happened. The cost of storing digital information plummeted precipitously, seemingly without end. It now made sense for a lot (albeit not all) of the stuff we had once thought would be the subject of live, interactive video telecom to instead be stored for replay on demand - either over wires (e.g. YouTube) or even from highly compact local storage media (e.g. video iPods). The 1993 You Will TV ad by AT&T, in which a kid looks at the live video feed of a remote robot flipping physical book pages never came to pass, because it became dirt cheap to snap and store digital page images in advance instead, in the manner of Google Books.

<center><big>AT&T TV ads about the future from 1993-1994</big><br><object width="445" height="364"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5MnQ8EkwXJ0&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1?rel=0&amp;border =1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5MnQ8EkwXJ0&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1?rel=0&amp;border =1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="445" height="364"></embed></object></center>
Videoconferencing and some other aspects of telepresence continue to expand, but they are doing so in a surprisingly paced manner, in marked contrast to the very explosive video-on-demand surprise. But serious people, like Ray Kurzweil, below, still look to a time, within a decade, when telepresence (much facilitated by virtual reality) becomes a routine part of everyone's life.<center><object id='cspan-video-player' classid='clsid:d27cdb6eae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000' codebase='http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0' align='middle' height='500' width='410'><param name='allowScriptAccess' value='true'/><param name='movie' value='http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlayer.swf?pid=194500-1&start=6692&end=7283'/><param name='quality' value='high'/><param name='bgcolor' value='#ffffff'/><param name='allowFullScreen' value='true'/><param name='flashvars' value='system=http://www.c-spanvideo.org/common/services/flashXml.php?programid=171739&style=full&start=669 2&end=7283'/>
<embed name='cspan-video-player' src='http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlayer.swf?pid=194500-1&start=6692&end=7283' base='http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/' allowScriptAccess='always' bgcolor='#ffffff' quality='high' allowFullScreen='true' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer' flashvars='system=http://www.c-spanvideo.org/common/services/flashXml.php?programid=171739&style=full&start=714 1&end=7305' align='middle' height='500' width='410'></embed></object></center>

In this context, it is hardly extraordinary to speculate on the type of entertainment modality explored in this thread, without regard to the specific artist. This is especially true as the economy-wrecking potential of global energy price spikes provides a powerful new spur to having communications substitute for the transportation of persons whenever effective.