Streaming, Texting and the Obama Inauguration
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: Obama, Inauguration, Streaming, Networks | Themes: The Internet
There you have it. The 44th and first African American President of the United States of America has been sworn in. So, without starting a political debate, lets talk about the technology that helped millions of people around the world watch history in the making.
Yesterday we discussed how the cellphone networks were doing everything they could to make sure everyone (especially those in Washington) could still make calls, send pictures, video and text messages, as well as update their Twitter, upload photos to the web and email like there’s no tomorrow while the ceremony was going on.
So how did it go? We want to hear all about your cell phone experiences over the last hour or so. Also, don’t forget to let us know who your carrier is. AT&T spent $4 million on making sure its 3G and 2G services were up to scratch and Sprint and Verizon made a lot of extra effort too with trucks on the ground to provide extra coverage, so if it wasn’t up to scratch, name ‘em and shame ‘em, boys.
Also how did you guys find the streaming? We assumed it would be fine but it seems the lads in our Culver City office had a bit of trouble; they missed the swearing in all together. Our Director of News Operations, Tuan Nguyen, sent a message just afterward and said that Hulu, CNN, Fox and Ustream were all impossibly slow and that he missed about 99 percent of the inauguration. Ouch. Gotta love working remotely, halfway around the world.
If you uploaded pics, tweeted, texted, emailed, called, watched or listened, we want to hear it. Leave your thoughts below. Again, we'd like to reiterate the political debate thing: there's a time and a place, and we're interested in tech at this time, in this place.
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Things were alright here in Canada, which, of course, isn't Washington, DC, but there was no less interest from the media. Rather than bother with any sort of live streaming, I turned to the old boob tube for my coverage.
It was on at least half of all the channels on cable, and it was interesting to see how some networks chose to stay quiet and let some of the genuinely dreadful parts play out (that poem, anyone?), while other networks would talk over every little part like it was for a sports game commentary and play-by-play.
TV is still the best way to watch from home.
Just imagine the awful Irish accents in the media here talking the whole way through Aretha Franklin. Have they no r-e-s-p-e-c-t?
Couldn't help it.
I'm up in Montana.
Streaming of the Inauguration was dreadful. I tried Hulu, Fox, a CBS one (through a local station) and CNN. CNN told me to many people were connected. Hulu was basically a still image with audio (image never changed as video feed was so slow). Fox was almost worse, as both the video and audio skipped. My CBS feed wasn't any better either. It eventually (right during Biden's swearing in) suddenly stopped working and never began again.
All this using a business T1 line. During use I used www.speakeasy.net to test my bandwidth and ensure I wasn't bottle necked on my end. Each time I tested I was showing full T1 capabilities both up and down.
So I missed the entire inauguration.
It pretty much shut down our Internet. It turns out that our small-time T1 provider has only 3 DS3's to support about 150K people.
I streamed it on my PC from thestar.com. It had 2 or 3 one second hiccups, but other than that, it was perfect. We're on Mediacom in mideast Illinois.
The stream from CNN.com worked great in Portland, OR. There were a couple of glitches here and there, but never more than a second or two. I blame most of that on the fact that I'm sharing a 2Mbps WiMax connection with 50 other people.
I streamed off of Hulu from Colorado and it was very good throughout the ceremony... Only a couple of ~1 second hiccups. The difference, I think, is that I work for an ISP with dual gigabit connections. Some of the people in the office did have trouble with MSNBC. We had customers having trouble, but it was universally a maxed out circuit. Our network had no bandwidth constraints throughout the ceremony (though, we did double our average peak).
I watched it here at the office in Orlando from www.pic2009.org/live and it was going fine up until the big names started coming in. I switched it to low bandwidth mode and everything was perfect and smooth from then on out. Our internet usually sucks here, but it was just fine for that.
most of my office went to the kitchen sitting area and there was a nice projector set up so we didnt have any issues. cable still works, ya'll should have tried it.
I had zero problems streaming the Hulu connection during the ceramonies. I'm located in NC so maybe I didn't have as many hops as some other users.
I guess it was pretty spotty all over, then. What a shame! Like jrabbitb I watched on telly so I had roughly ten different channels to choose from.