Review: iTunes Festival app for iOS

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

iTunes is the world's biggest music retailer so it is only natural that they would, from time to time, celebrate this key position by having a few concerts. The iTunes Festival is a month-long fête that takes place in London, England's Roundhouse. It will feature 62 artists in 31 nights and many of the concerts are free to iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users through the iTunes Festival app.

2011 has been a really good year for iOS users. iOS5 is around the corner and now 31 days of free music concerts! This is the first time that the iTunes Festival is being streamed live (and previous 2011 concerts you might have missed can be accessed as well).

The free app itself is a straightforward affair. We downloaded in into our iPad 2 and our iPhone 4. We are beta testing iOS 5 on the iPhone 4 and were not at all surprised that it didn't work. On iOS 5 beta 1, the app starts up and then implodes as it takes you back to the home screen.

On the iPad 2 with the current public iOS 4 version, it works great. The app opens a schedule in calendar form and you are presented with all the concerts (past and present). We managed to catch the last two tunes from Paul Simon's superb festival opener and it looked spectacular on the iPad.

There were some hiccups, however. Early on, there weere some latency issues, then the video dissapeared. We simply tried restarting the app again and managed to get back on without any significant problems.

Anyone who loves live music and who would want to check out the featured bands should download the app. Non iOS device users can still watch the live shows (and presumably the recorded ones) on the Mac and PC iTunes client. We're not sure if the AppleTV (a perfect device for playing back streaming concerts on a large screen HDTV) will get to join the party.

What I find most interesting about this is Apple's willingness to stream the live shows to hundreds of thousands of iOS users around the world. It is likely that they can do this now because they are stress testing their three new server farms which are being prepared for the launch of iCloud in the next few months.

Rating: 4 out of 5