Last week U2 and YouTube have partnered to provide a live broadcast of the U2 concert in the Rose Bowl (watch it here), which attracted ~ 10 million viewers. Tonight Facebook/Livestream are broadcasting the Foo Fighters concert from Studio 606. This is great for fans of U2 and Foo Fighters, great for YouTube and Facebook and great for the Music industry.

In both cases you could watch these concerts live on Boxee, or tune in later and watch it on demand later. There is an app for the Foo Fighters concert on the App Box (screenshot below), and the U2 concert is available through the YouTube app.

I hope this is a trend that will continue to grow. There’s nothing like going to a live concert, but when it’s not playing near you, tuning to the live stream is the best thing you can ask for as a fan. It will probably raise the likelihood of that fan buying concert tickets when the tour stops in his town.

Since the release of Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest and greatest OS, Boxee users who upgraded have found themselves with a remote that’s possessed or at least seems to be since it controls multiple programs at the same time. The wizzes over at IOSPIRIT have come to the rescue with new software called Candelair to let people use their IR remote (Apple, Logitech Harmony, etc.) to control Boxee as they did prior to upgrading.  Candelair intercepts incoming remote signals on your Apple, and routes them intelligently to different programs, including Boxee, Front Row, and others.  Kudos to Felix and the IOSPIRIT team for coming up with this elegant solution.

Of course iPhone owners can always use the Boxee app, which makes it easy to navigate Boxee using the touchscreen and input text using the iPhone’s on screen keyboard.  For those who want to control more than just Boxee, check out IOSPIRIT’s Remote Buddy app which gives you control of 100+ programs on your Mac, using your iPhone.

The upcoming version of Boxee will address these issues, but in the meantime we wanted to make sure you knew about these solutions – and we got to Photoshop stuff, which is always fun.

A few years ago TV shows started coming out on DVD, which made it possible to watch a full season in a condensed fashion. DVRs and the Internet have made this type of consumption even more common. I think we may be getting to the point where this new behavior should start changing the way TV shows are being written and the way stories are told.

For me, appointment viewing exists only in the case of sports. When it comes to scripted, pre-recorded content I have become spoiled. I don’t want to wait a week between each episode. I prefer to wait for a season to end and then watch the episodes one after the other. There are lots of great shows and I have a long list of stuff I want to watch (recently finished Rome, currently watching The Wire and in my pipeline are The Tudors, Flight of the Concords, Breaking Bad and Mad Men), so I see no reason to wait anxiously for new episodes of a currently airing show.

I realize this is far from being a mainstream behavior, but I believe this is going to be the way most people will consume episodic content in the future. The issue is that today writers create artificial suspense before commercial breaks and at the end of each episode (to ensure  viewers will tune in next week), and they also feel the need to remind the viewer of key plot themes (since it’s been a week and the viewer may have forgotten). When you watch a few episodes over a short period of time these “tricks” are clearly apparent and they hurt real story telling.

The on-demand experience should also put into question other axioms. For example, why stick with the format of 22/44 min long episodes? some plot lines could be longer and some shorter. A show could also be non-linear, letting the viewer follow different paths from different angles, putting new story telling tools in the hands of the writers.

In many ways taking TV shows made for traditional TV and putting them online is like the early days of TV itself, when the shows were essentially radio programs in front of a camera. Like TV was in the 1950′s the Internet is a new medium. It represents great opportunities for new formats to emerge. Probably in 5-10 years the most interesting shows will be made for the Internet, and they will be very different from what we see today on TV.

* the title of the blog post was inspired plagiarized from the off-broadway show I, Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change