Considering how long it's been since I was in my Floyd phase, it was also getting kinda choked up seeing the band together on stage. Rather than nitpick the fine points of the performance, I think the big accomplishment in the performance is not the performance itself, but just the moment of seeing Waters back with the band. Let's face it, bands rarely put on their best performances at these kinds of megaevents -- the scope and scale of the event itself typically overwhelm whatever weight an artist can give the music.

As for the coverage on MTV, it was pretty awful. Way too much talking over by ill-informed hosts, and really poor coverage all the way around considering that they had a live event going on. All they had to do was stick a few cameras around the event site, show the music, cut to commercial every now and then, and have the hosts introduce highlights and set pieces whenever they had a break on stage. They couldn't even get that right. It's almost like NBC loaned out a bunch of their Olympic producers, and schooled MTV on the art of how to botch "virtual live" coverage.

The coverage for the original Live Aid was also pretty hacked up (probably inevitable given that it was a fundraiser and plugs for donations were part of that event) and the idiotic chatter from the MTV VJs was pretty annoying on that day as well, but at least the coverage conveyed a sense of the event as it was unfolding. With the Live 8 coverage, I never picked up on the true scope and scale of the event because it was mostly commercials, recaps, and airhead VJs trying to tell us how big the event is, when all they had to do was shut up and let the event speak for itself.