U2 / PopMart / The Burst story
PopMart, locally.
Full HD throughout.
Between 1998 and 2001, seamless internet video was a hard problem. Bandwidth was scarce. Every second received ahead of the playhead mattered: run out, and the picture stopped. James remembers building and testing the delivery systems that tried to make music and video feel continuous across radically different connections.
1998–2001 / JAMES’S PERSPECTIVE
We were building tomorrow
on yesterday’s bandwidth.
James sees those years as helping invent the way the internet delivers music and video today. Behind what now feels as effortless as pressing play on YouTube were people solving the difficult parts: acquisition, encoding, compatibility, buffering and timing.
Now his own local AI is helping him recreate that lifetime of work — the machines, the music, the experiments and the moments that changed his direction.
What a time to be alive.Explore all 18 movies from James’s supplied PopMart collection. Keep the HD picture and change the connection. Fast links start with 10 seconds ready, rest delivery at 2 minutes ahead, and refill at 1 minute ahead. Slow links give buffering priority, building a larger reserve before playback. The bars reveal the work behind a continuous picture.
The clip James streamed.
James recalls serving U2’s “Mofo” from the PopMart Mexico City performance through BurstWare. The existing project file is a 90-second, 480 × 270 excerpt. It is retained below as an archival reference, separately from the full-resolution concert player.
THE CALIFORNIA DELIVERY / JAMES’S ACCOUNT
Two audiences. One demanding delivery chain.
James recalls delivering to these California audiences while installing the cable headend with Tandberg TV playheads. His work covered satellite acquisition and encoding the incoming material into multiple formats.
James describes starting with 10 seconds of playable material, then managing delivery just in time across millions of devices. With the buffer at 3:00 and playback at 1:00, delivery could pause; it resumed when only 1 minute remained ahead. The intention was to keep enough material ready for seamless playback while avoiding unnecessary continuous delivery. Slow connections still needed patience or refills.
He describes running simulated live-acquisition tests across Real, Apple, Microsoft and MPEG players, checking that playback worked across the bandwidth rates under test. The job joined the acquisition equipment, encoding workflow and the viewer’s player into one tested delivery chain.
Audience figures, equipment terminology and James’s role are his personal recollection; independent event audience records have not yet been located.
The principle that carried forward
James sees the same discipline in media delivery today: acquire the source, prepare compatible formats, and manage delivery ahead of playback. Modern HLS similarly defines sequential media segments and multiple encoded variants for different network conditions. The protocols and quality-selection methods have evolved. HTTP Live Streaming overview · RFC 8216 ↗
Original local excerpt · 90 seconds · SD archival reference
This file is not the full concert and is not labelled HD.
The player above joins all 18 supplied PopMart movies into one continuous, approximately 103-minute local recording, with song chapters in James’s M3U playlist order. Each file is 1920 × 1080 H.264/AAC. Some original filenames say “4K”; these supplied copies are 1080p. The individual source streams are retained locally. The continuous player uses a consistent, high-bitrate 1080p encode with short picture-and-audio crossfades and a consistent frame rate for smoother chapter transitions; no upscaling is applied. The collection is presented as supplied, with no claim that missing set-list songs are included.