It's quite nostalgic. It reminds me of the Madonna gig five years ago, where the FT's IT correspondent claimed several million people had watched (in reality no one saw the stream since it just clogged the web back then). There were similar reports for Elton and Robbie streamed gigs.
Now, of course, the web can manage a U2 gig (or rather companies like Akamai and Limelight can), along with England internationals.
But the news that Rihanna is to do a mobile video gig makes me crack up. My Android mobile on the Orange network barely works for voice calls. For data, it takes around a minute or so to load a web page.
It's a brave step by Nokia, which is peddling backwards in the mobile phone market quicker than you can say, well, sdrawkcab.
It's not that mobiles aren't capable of showing video, of course, it's just that the networks can't cope. But what I do know is that the FT and other paper will no longer report 30 million viewers for the show. Where alternative forms of TV delivery are concerned, the naivety of journalists has been tempered, but I'm sure Nokia's PRs will spin away..