Anyone that remembers the first transatlatic television pictures on Telstar with Raymond Baxter saying yes, it’s a face – that’s definitely a man’s face as a shadow appeared across a furiously slipping television raster will not be surprised that in Sun Microsystems Inc’s bold venture to put the Rolling Stones live on the Internet in the early hours of Saturday morning GMT, it was like listening to the Stones on the phone when at the receiving end, the music was being picked up on a cellular phone in a car parked behind the crowd with the windows rolled and Jumping Jack Flash was made to show his age as he jerked at eight frames a second; for sceptics, don’t forget that that Telstar broadcast evolved to the point where you can scarcely tell whether the interviewee is in Washington or in a London studio.
