Notes from Sweden

.

You would have thought they would have learned from Live Aid and Live 8, but no, Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT is making a mess of Live Earth. At every opportunity they keep breaking back to a studio in Stockholm where they blab on and on in Swedish, instead of letting the music happen.

They did the same thing both times before. Presumably the announcers are trying to find a reason for being there, but it is terribly annoying. They even talk over the (admittedly many) Save the Earth public service announcements.

To avoid the constant breaks, watch instead the MSN feed (which unfortunately is starting to break up and lag now, possibly because more and more of Europe and North America are starting to tune in).

SVT has a chat channel during Live Earth, but they are obviously censoring criticism of cutting away from the broadcast. One comment that did make it past the censor asked “Are we missing any songs while you talk in the studio?” The answer was no, they were talking during the “commercial breaks”.

This is incorrect on several levels. First of all, they are taking a BBC feed, and there are no commercials. What they referring to can only be the environmental short films, which they are depriving the Swedish audience of. And they are also obviously talking much longer than the length of the short films (this being obvious by comparing to the MSN feed).

Seems that despite criticism, they are intent on repeating their past mistakes and will continue to mess up the event for those of us who want to see all of Live Earth and not some self-important reporters in a studio in Stockholm.