Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

President Obama Inauguration Online, Live Streaming and Social Media Defines Inauguration Coverage

Everyday since the 2008 Primary Election season during my commute to work I've seen a McCain/Palin poster on a hill off the side of the highway. It's been prominently displayed in clear site and with the outcome of the election decided months ago it's a symbol to a lost cause, a daily reminder of the political battle between hope and fear. But we all know that hope prevailed and that all led up to inauguration day.

Where were you when Barack Obama took the oath of office to become the 44th President of the United States of America? Did you watch it online? Were you on Facebook? Twitter? Friendfeed? Did you watch it on TV or listen on the radio? While the world watched with anticipation, the day came and went and history was made right before our eyes.


For many Americans it was just another day of work and chores and for many it was a time of celebration. "The end of an error." as @Stranhan wrote on Twitter as the cast of characters from the political stage -- former Presidents and First Ladies, political leaders and, the old and the new guard came into the picture and took part in the great demonstration of democracy.

For me, I had to work and it was my job in corporate video communications to distribute the live feed from our DirectTV system into several of our regional office conference rooms and out to our private videoconferencing network. Our IT department had blocked all Internet ports to streaming and social media sites so our videoconferencing help desk line was ringing off the hook with last minute requests to connect to the broadcast. I know a lot people that took the day off to watch it with family, friends or in public squares. Here's the view from our master control room where I watched the inauguration. It's certainly not a high quality image but it's a historic moment in time from my point of view.

Now that the Obama administration has completed its first day in office I think it's time for that McCain/Palin sign to come down.



I didn't get to view any of the live streams from CNN, CBS, Hulu or other sites but the numbers are in and from what Dan Rayburn said CBS had the best online video viewing experience. Pete Wylie of Fierce Online Video said, "CNN.com reported streaming 21.3 million online video streams in nine hours yesterday, reaching 1.3 million simultaneous streams, according to the New York Times. Akamai, a content delivery network that handles video traffic for many major media sites, said it delivered more than 7 million streams at once during Obama's inaugural address. These figures topped the previous high, set during Election Day 2008... MSNBC.com and FoxNews.com also experienced heavy traffic, streaming 14 million and 5 million online videos respectively during the ceremony, according to the Boston Globe."

Mashable posted a detailed analysis of the social media effect, By the Numbers: Inauguration Day's Impact on Social Media, with visuals showing the peak numbers during Obama's swearing in ceremony.

While I haven't been able to read through all my RSS feeds, here's a sampling of what I read from the blogs:
  • Reviewing the inauguration live streams - Lost Remote TV Blog - Wow, what a day. Millions of people at work during the inauguration punched it up live on the web, creating record traffic surges and a fair amount of glitches spanning news sites and CDNs. Dan Rayburn compared the live inauguration streams and posts his reviews right here. The best according to Dan? The CBS O&Os, which our own Kent Chapline reviews below. So, the inauguration was far and away the largest live streaming event in history. Or was it? “While this is a question many want to know the answer to, it’s one that nobody can truly answer,” writes Rayburn, who says a lack of unified historical metrics is to blame.

  • Inauguration Online Video Recap: Records, Innovation, Loss Leader | Online Video Watch
    No surprise we saw record numbers for online video viewing during yesterday’s Inauguration. But while it was a banner day in terms of traffic and innovation, it also showcased the utter inability of media to monetize the massive amount of video being delivered. From my personal experience, just about every site appeared to run into issues between 11:45 AM when Akamai reported peak traffic of 5.4 million visitors per minute for news traffic and 12:15 PM when Akamai served more than 7 million peak concurrent streams suggesting there may have been some backbone scalability issues.
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Sunday, November 16, 2008

President-elect Obama Ditches Old Media for New Media, Weekly Address Moves from Radio to YouTube

There's been a lot of discussion around the internet since President-Elect Barack Obama announced that his weekly radio messages will become video messages available each week on his YouTube Channel ChangeDotGov.

It's an interesting development in how social media has transformed the way our political leaders engage in conversation and community.


Your Weekly Address from the President-Elect
President-elect Obama talks about the economy in this week's Democratic address. For more information, visit http://www.change.gov

While comments have been disabled for the video the conversation has unfolded in other forums like FriendFeed where Allen Stern and Dan Farber both raised the issue of the President-elect posting on a commercial site which has the appearance of favoring or endorsing YouTube over other video sharing sites.

Allen Stern said,"My issue with the YouTube selection is around fair competition. I'd prefer that the videos not be embeddable and be offered online only on the whitehouse.gov and change.gov websites. If they are going to use online video hosting services as an outlet, I'd like to see a full RFP process take place. All video hosts who want to host the weekly videos should have an equal chance of winning the government contract." - from Obama Says Yes We Can Use YouTube - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek

Dan Farber asked this question, "But why should the incoming president, or public official, favor one Internet video service over another? Yahoo, MSN, Blip, Veoh, and other video-sharing sites shouldn't have to lobby the White House for equal time or at least some time. I am sure the choice of YouTube was practical, and has nothing to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt's very public support of Obama. Implicit product endorsements are difficult to avoid for any public official." - from Obama appoints YouTube (Google) as secretary of video | Outside the Lines - CNET News

Many others love the idea and say that it's a good step toward reaching the masses since YouTube is so mainstream compared to other video sharing sites and actually the video is also available on AOL, Yahoo, and MSN and High-resolution, Quicktime format: (106MB .mov file.) I noticed that the video on Change.gov uses the embedded YouTube player and they also included the full text transcript in the post. If they continue to distribute videos on YouTube I'd like to see them incorporate the new captions feature so that it would be easier to translate his message into different languages and make it more accessible for the hearing impaired. That would be an added value to using YouTube as a distribution platform.

Coturnix had another perspective, "People like Dan Farber and Allen Stern are worried about favouritism - why YouTube and not other video services? Answer: if the only place they place a video is Change.org, then someone else will put it on YouTube, perhaps edited, with open comments, who knows what else. By posting it on YouTube themselves, the Obama comms folks are putting a degree of control over the message. In the next few months, they may decide to do the same on several other video-hosting services. This was just the first address, and YouTube, being such an 6000lbs gorilla (or is it an elephant in the room?), is the obvious place to go and test the waters first before embarking on a more ambitious program." - from A Blog Around The Clock : Will there be new communication channels in the Obama administration?

I agree and I'll be watching as he continues make history and I'll be participating in the conversation.

Here are some related blog posts and discussion:
Update: Fixed a few typos, grammatical errors and added some new text.
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Tuesday, November 4, 2008

President-Elect Barack Obama's Acceptance Speech on UStream

The internet was on fire this evening as Barack Obama won the election to be the 44th President of the United States of America. His acceptance speech was streamed live on his UStream.tv channel and is embedded below.



Brad Hunstable, Founder had this to say on the Ustream.tv blog,"Tonight I sat back and watched with amazement one of our nation’s most sacred principles unfold live on Ustream. Over a million people followed the election on Ustream today- from small election parties, to passionate professional broadcasts.

Whether you agree or not, are red or blue, Democrat or Republican, history was made today and many experienced this through our humble service. Over the last 2 years, John, Gyula and I have had the opportunity to meet many people and see many things because of Ustream, but tonight, for me, was the most powerful."
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Saturday, August 9, 2008

My ooVoo Day With... Political Edition: Queen of Spain


I had the pleasure of meeting Queen of Spain Blog political blogger Erin Kotecki Vest on my last My ooVoo Day With... Political Edition. She only had 30 minutes to share since she was going live with her weekly show The Sunday Inquisition w/ the Queen of Spain from 7-9 pm pacific time. I'll talk more about that following my summary of our ooVoo chat. Erin was connecting from Detroit where she was visiting with family and also joining the call was Digitalsista Shireen who I had met earlier in the day and Jill Foster. This was my third ooVoo call of the day and I was back at home by then and eager to meet the Queen of Spain.

"Erin Kotecki Vest spent ten years as a broadcast journalist in Los Angeles, Orlando and Detroit winning six Golden Mic Awards with LA news institution KFWB. She now serves as Political Director and Election 08 Producer for BlogHer.com as well as contributing regularly to the Huffington Post, MOMocrats.com, and her own site Queen of Spain Blog."

[snapshot-<span class=
Since we only had a short time with Erin we mainly talked about her life changing Blogher interview with Obama. She wrote about it in a two part series on her blog here and here where she gives behind the scenes details of the experience, her emotional state and how she prepared for the interview that changed her life.

On her blog she said,
"I wasn’t supposed to be doing the interview."
"I shopped at the Eugene, Oregon Target at 8pm Friday night for camera-ready clothes, notecards, and hairspray."
"I met the Senator from Illinois in the hallway of Roseburg High School while he was on his way to use the rest room. I know this. He told me so."


Our ooVoo conversation started with Jill asking the Erin how she prepared. Erin said the Blogher community drafted collected the 12 questions which were not secret so there was no fear of being ambushed. Each candidate would have time to prepare and this made it easy for to do interview. She counted her blessings and didn't have to go crazy. The on-camera interview was conducted in Roseburg, Oregon, by Erin with input from Contributing Editor Kim Pearson. She got through 7 of the 12 questions in the 10 minutes and on her blog she said, "This interview was not a surprise investigation by us. We’ve had these questions on the record since the BlogHer conference last July. So I knew this was not going to be a ‘follow up question’ or ‘on the spot attack’ type of interview. That helped. Back in the day I would have been plotting 40 follow ups and 40 different takes on those follow ups depending on his answers."

I asked Erin of the politicians she's interview who seemed the most sincere. She said Obama was the most genuine she ever met, he's charismatic, he had no handlers, was not so scripted or protected with every word out of his mouth and that was a relief for her. Momocrats said when Obama speaks and does his "ums" he reminds you of that college professor that was a little absent minded, but you saw the wheels spinning, watched the gears go and you see how brilliant he is.

The blogging community is growing she said and high profile people like Michelle Obama are now blogging on Blogher. When asked how could McCain supporters could be engaged she said she's not sure how to get them to support Obama and she's not trying to change their minds. Her biggest worry is the undecided voters and independents.

On her blog she said, "I love being a blogger. I love being a blogher. I love that after I interviewed the man who very well could make history I could tell you this story, and scream and cry. Years ago I could never have done that." Now they call her for interviews and she doesn't wait their call. Although she said she's still hasn't heard from McCain's people.

Once again our ooVoo time was up and Erin had to go. Her humor, fun spirit and passion for the political process and citizen activism was a real inspiration and 30 minutes of conversation was not enough. So after our ooVoo chat ended I logged onto Erin's Sunday Inquisition show and couldn't help but notice that Jill and Digitalsista were there too.


The main topic of that broadcast was about Lee Stranahan and how he's been banned from posting at Daily Kos, a liberal political blog after he started talking about the John Edwards scandal which finally broke on mainstream news yesterday. There was a lively and energetic discussion and Stranahan joined to share his side of the story. He said has been doing short video parodies on YouTube since December and cross posting on Kos 2-3 months ago starting posting on Huffington post doing comedy. He's been looking at Edwards scandal and his post, Say It Ain't So, John -- Why Progressives Need To Get Out In Front Of The John Edwards Affair Rumors 180,000 views, went viral, hugely viral. He thought he made his point clear that he was a progressive democrat and wasn't prepared for all the harshness and extreme backlash.



Related links:
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