tom willerer . com - Live Streaming Obama Inauguration

January 20, 2009 at 8:46am
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Live Streaming Obama Inauguration

There are two sites that I know of that are live streaming the Obama Inauguration: Hulu.com and C-SPAN.org. Naturally, I’ve been trying them both, but with limited success, at least as far as C-SPAN is concerned.

I guess it makes sense that the site with a commercial interest would have a much better experience, but I wish C-SPAN would have made their coverage more accessible. Also, it took about 10 attempts before the C-SPAN coverage actually started streaming as I’m sure their servers are overloaded by the influx of traffic, whereas Hulu started right up and made it very easy to find their coverage. The only (minor) complaint I have is that they are airing Fox News coverage.

Overall, Hulu has a much better experience for live streaming. The coverage was easy to find, it started right up (after one 30 second commercial) and there have been zero interruptions in the stream. And, as a bonus, I can embed the experience from Hulu on my own blog, if I so choose.

Update: Hulu got buggy right before Obama was sworn in so I switched over to www.pic2009.org, which uses Microsoft Silverlight, and the experience is great so far.

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