Sean Parker and
Shawn Fanning are back together, this time in a legal venture, partnering on the new live social video platform
Airtime. Last night, before hitting the talk-show circuit to promote the stat-up—including
Fallon last night and
The Today Show this morning—Sean and Shawn threw a party in Manhattan to celebrate the launch.
Ironically—and hilariously—the event was beset by nonstop technical difficulties—with celebrity guests improvising through the series of glitches. Happily,
Page Six dispatched a spy to the event, who provided the blow-by-blow:
After starting an hour late at Milk Studios,
Jimmy Fallon kicked things off with a Q&A with Parker and Fanning before
Olivia Munn,
Julia Louis-Dreyfus,
Ed Helms,
Jim Carrey and an off-site
Alicia Keys and
Snoop Dogg, wearing sunglasses and smoking, attempted to join in via video on Airtime.
First, Munn’s video feed froze. Then, after two failed attempts to patch Snoop through on video, the other stars began demonstrating how the site works, each of them battling errors.
Community star
Joel McHale weathered the brunt of the breakdowns, fighting feedback before his microphone died. McHale improvised for five minutes to a room full of tech journalists as the demo failed, joking, “How many of you are blogging how smoothly this is going right now? . . . Sean Parker is a legend. They will erect statues to him very soon. I just love that he has to go to the back of the computer and pull out wires.”
McHale added, “Right now, what this is called is disaster,” and to Parker, “Whose ass are you going to fire?” Parker responded, “We’re gonna restart the computer and blame it on someone who doesn’t work for Airtime, like
Microsoft,
Google,
Apple,
Facebook…”
When things were finally running. Louis-Dreyfus was patched through, saying, “What time is it? It’s like three in the morning.” Carrey, appearing later, quipped, “Where do I download the free music?”
Parker admitted he was relieved he had the celebs’ wit to fall back on. “Thank God you guys are funny, because we’re screwed,” he said, adding, “We really have no business being in the technology business right now.”
An Airtime rep (blaming it on someone who doesn’t work for Airtime) last night explained, “The glitches…were generated by a custom- built intranet produced specifically for the event: not Airtime. ”