The de-Evolution of Video

On the plane returning from my recent vacation I saw a documentary on The Beatles.  The documentary while lacking the music of The Beatles (likely due to the high cost of acquiring the rights to Beatles songs) had plenty of video footage showing The Beatles many live performances on television.  Last night I was watching some episodes of VH1 Storytellers, which had live performances by Kanye, Jay-Z, and Mary J Blige.  The de-evolution of the live music performance on video was very apparent to me as I contrasted these performances.  The Beatles performances were often one (at the most two) camera angles and there was minimal editing as the camera looked directly at the band.  The band likely was told they can't move around much, because they had to stay in the frame.  Contrast that with modern performances where the artist paces, jumps, skips, and dances all around the stage enjoying the freedom of a completely wireless system.  That isn't the distracting part though, because I think even with an artist moving around like a grasshopper two cameras would still manage fine (one from far and zoomed in).  Unfortunately that was not how these performances were filmed.  They had no fewer than three cameras each panning and zooming as often as the artist moved.  Even worse was the quick edits.  I would guess that no more than 30 seconds elapsed before a cut to a different angle.  This frentic pacing made it difficult to really watch the artist and enjoy what is most interesting about live performances on video.  I think this argument has been made before, but I'll make it again and blame this de-evolution on MTV.  I think MTV pioneered this kind of rapid cut editing, which as I recall when it first came out gave the performance a more edgy feel.  Now it just seems dated and trying too hard.