Coming Soon to YouTube: The Conan Tour? (video)

O’Brien can’t host a TV talk show until September. But that doesn’t mean his fans can’t use his tour to create an Internet show

Conan O’Brien may be Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television — but that doesn’t mean he might not be popping up on small screens all over the country again as soon as next month.

The fine folks at Mediaite.com — specifically, the dapper duo of Steve Krakauer and Glynnis MacNicol — invited me to appear on their "Office Hours" webcast Thursday. One of the first issues we discussed was whether The Army of Coco might actually end up becoming the unofficial producers of a de facto Internet-based O’Brien show.

"My first thought (when hearing about the tour) was, ‘Will it be filmed and uploaded in little segments to the Internet?’" MacNicol asked during our interview.

Smart woman, she. I’d been focused on whether O’Brien’s reps might be interested in documenting the Legally Prohibited tour for posterity by allowing a documentarian such as R.J. Cutler to film the whole event.

In fact, it’s very likely that some of the hundreds of thousands of fans who’ve bought tickets to the show will end up recording segments of shows via Flip Video cams or iPod Nanos.

As I noted, the Web is already filled with allegedly illegal recordings of concert performances — many of which stay up on YouTube and other sites because they help build fan interest in singers. Likewise, it would make sense for O’Brien’s reps to turn a blind eye to any bootleg videos of his tour.

After all, the whole point of this tour isn’t to make money but to keep fans engage with O’Brien and to keep his name in the pop culture spotlight — since he can’t make paid appearances on TV until Sept. 1. NBC might not like it, but it’s hard to see what they could do to stop O’Brien’s fans from serving as his de facto broadcasters.

You can check out my appearance on "Office Hours" below. Warning: There’s about a minute of dead air at the start of the video — and yours truly has a tendency to speak just a bit too fast sometimes.

More to read: 

Coco-a-Go-Go! Conan Tour Starts April 12

 

Comments