There are plenty of places to watch the inauguration today online (see our guide). I’ve been clicking around, and many of the streams are jittery, as you would expect, but I find myself coming back to CNN’s live stream. The video keeps skipping on me, but at least the audio is consistent. Maybe that’s because CNN.com is serving a record number of live video streams (13.9 million live streams between 6 AM and 11:45 AM ET, versus 5.3 million on Election Day, the previous record. See update below). The big draw, however, is that CNN partnered with Facebook, and I can watch the proceedings along with comments from all my Facebook friends in the sidebar.
My friend Dimitry Leger noted that “Obama looks like a heavyweight boxer waiting to enter the ring for the big fight.” When Bush appeared Kevin Werbach, who is on the Obama transition team, commented, “crowd is singing the nanana goodbye song now.” (Scott Beale also noticed this). Loic Le Meur doesn’t like all the praying. Kevin Rose “is hoping this stream starts working…”
Watching events like these with people you know is always better than watching alone, but since most of us are at work today, Facebook serves as a proxy for a virtual living room that can hold hundreds of people. I find these comments much more interesting than random Twitters from people I don’t know. So I am going to stick with Facebook and CNN for the rest of the inauguration ceremony. (Uh-oh the stream just went completely kaput for me—at least I can still read everyone’s commentary. I’m switching to Hulu for the live video).
Update: During Obama’s speech, the comment stream was filled with everyone’s favorite quotes in real-time. (His flubbing the oath was also noticed). After the speech, some typical reactions from Netvibes founder Tariq Krim: “greatness is never given, it is earned;” and from ex-Googler Chris Sacca describing the moment as experienced in D.C., “Yes! Everyone is crying and hugging. Everyone.”
Update 2: As of 10:15 AM PST/1:15 EST today, Facebook reports:
-600,000 status updates have been posted so far through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
-There were an average of 4,000 status updates every minute during the broadcast
-There were 8,500 status updates the minute Obama began his speech
-Obama’s page on Facebook has more than 4 million fans and more than 500,000 wall posts
-Millions of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast
And CNN served more than 18.8 million live streams between 6 AM and 1 PM EST, with a peak of 1.3 million streams just before Obama began his speech.
Update 3: Make that 21.3 million streams on CNN.com as of 3:30 PM EST and 136 million pageviews.
For some reason on mine it told me that “I love my little elf boy”.
http://www.thef...ittleelfboy.jpg
http://www.pic2...ge/content/live
For links to continuing live inaugural event webcast coverage throughout the day today and even tomorrow, please check out the website that my brother and I created called lyvegyde (http://www.lyvegyde.com). We gather links to live, online events. Thanks!
-Mary
The Hulu stream, although in partnership with Fox News, has been by far the best available stream. No skipping, no buffering, solid definition and audio is clear.
http://www.hulu...ve/inauguration
I actually used the Hulu widget on my blog, and it worked surprisingly flawlessly:
http://www.blog...-event-of-2009/
Todd, the embed version of the Hulu video failed big time.
Hulu completely stopped while I was watching; I found the best stream to be CBS News’ local station sites.
j
I agree this is a great interactive experience. But, I’m not sure who they are using as their CDN for the video delivery–I’ve had a few outtages and I can’t post anymore directly via the FB/CNN microsite.
For an HD viewing experience online, check out this Sky News showing. This is delivered via Move Networks and Level 3 CDN:
http://skynews....s/hd/index.html
I had no problem at all with CNN, although I closed the Facebook portion immediately.
Funny, using Ghostery (Firefox Add-on) on TC shows me all the invisible trackers you are using. You are using more than I’ve ever seen by 3 fold:
Google Analytics
Federated Media
Google Adsense
Doubleclick
Snap
OpenAds
Seesmic
shareThis
Doubleclick
Tribal Fusion
Some of them were duplicated, which I’ve never seen before, either. I guess it’s fitting for the tech blog to do this.
Oh an the inauguration was good on Hulu.
Clayton,
Thanks for using Ghostery, I’m the author.
TC is definitely a Hall-of-Fame(?) candidate with their amount of trackers.
Cheers,
David
I had to close the CNN feed because it was lagging. CBSNews and Hulu had a better broadcast.
The BBC stream hasn’t been bad, but I don’t know if you get it in the States. It’s kind of weird, though, to listen to the inauguration with British commentary!
I built an application and launched it today to do something similar, and i’m guessing CNN just stole my idea
http://apps.fac...om/socialforum/
@Andrew Mager,
That’s strange. I tried CNN, inaugural.senate.gov (the official source), MSNBC, BBC and a few others. The official source was alright until about 10 minutes before Obama’s speech. But, CNN was virtually flawless. It paused probably twice, and with little interruption.
“Loic Le Meur doesn’t like all the praying”
yeah cause the last thing this country needs is any help from God. Maybe that’s why France is in such great shape.
yeah god has really helped us so far! all the coddling of religious idiots has really helped advance this country, right?
irrational thinking NEVER helps and religion is ALWAYS irrational
stupid believer
why don’t you idiots get a tv?
is technology fetishism worth more than just getting to watch whats going on?
no wonder you have no girlfriends
@ work watching, and with regular beatings we get no television
He has a point. My girlfriend left me because I could only stream pixelated videos
I watched it over here in England on the BBC News 24 website, was rock solid during the entire thing.
Not bad…live video streams and synchronized sharing of user comments…justin.tv at large scale…
I think the combination might be an interesting research area for the video mining community – anybody there who knows how to get this data?
I think that it is very ironic that CNN an old mono directional media company and Facebook a web 2.0 closed source content sharecropping silo have teamed up on a day that we should associate with freedom and fairness.
BBC did the job just fine.. no stuttering at all. Betting it was a UK only stream though? Anyone know?
CNN streaming worked great, unfortunately it was a few minutes behind. So much for “live” streaming.
PCTVCables.com
Anybody think that Chief Justice Roberts changed the language of the oath or is is version the official oath? I sure don’t recall any President in my lifetime having to repeat what Roberts said. President Obama was prepared for a different version. Your thoughts and comments please!
slow buffer
Funny, the CNN/Facebook stream was “full, sorry” when I got there. Tubes were clogged at every site, streaming speed was miserable and jerky, our 5Mb up/down was like a dread ghost town of wanting – and not getting – inaugural goodness.
I thought that overall it worked well. It could have been more feature rich – i.e. when someone comments on your status you can easily see that – but otherwise good first effort. Perfect stream would have helped a lot, but always hard to complain about free, plus nearly 14 million viewers will do that.
It is so great with these new media Facebook, CNN and other Internet TV sites which are social. I am watching it now live in here internet-tv webpage: http://www.en.tvnewsradio.com
Anyone know where we can see live (or canned) metrics about the video/web/download/streaming traffic re the inauguration? Such as that Erick reported above re cnn.com? (”13.9 million live streams”)
All in all, the CNN had a better visibility of all.
And that “Na na na na hey hey hey Goodbye” song on YouTube has almost 1M views, and most comments are saying goodbuy to Bush. WTF?
who cares
We’re still live streaming on Facebook, you can video chat with all your Facebook friends at the same time as watching the stream.
Main application link:
http://www.face...?id=11621746459
Or simply:
http://www.obamatogether.com
Indeed, CHANGE seems to have come to America. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds in the coming months. I sure hope Obama delivers.
Facebook is going to change a lot of things. The opportunities are endless.
What an incredible day, not only in American and world history but also in the history of digital media
Indeed, it’s a new day. A new day that will surely lead to lots of change for not only American people but democratic loving people all over the world.
CNN hold the event CNN Live in collaborate with Facebook. That is very nice. But, we Japanese can’t watch the movie.
What if Fb partnered with some YouTube channel in a similar way? I can see the headline now: “Fb and YouTube partner: Use of phrase ‘GET BACK TO WORK’ increases 400%”
hy
My wife and I wish President Obama and all his wonderful staff the very best in the coming months. Our country is in trouble and we are so happy that you are all in the White House and planning to rescue the economy. You all have a hard job ahead of you. Wishing you all the luck in the world. God Bless all of you.
Sincerely,
narinder singh and family (ordinary citizen)
am satisfied with what i see