Obama inauguration coverage sets new live streaming record for AP

It seems that more and more people are eschewing television in favour of online content, when it comes to obtaining and providing coverage of important events.

According to the Associated Press, eight million users watched the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States in Washington D.C on Tuesday, via AP’s Online Video Network (OVN).

At its peak, AP claim that as many as 374,000 streams were accessed concurrently.

This is a significant increase from the 80,000 live streams AP recorded during its coverage of the presidential election night in November.

In addition, 160 media outlets subscribed to their premium service, which provided a video widget allowing for multiple viewing angles of the event.

Static media also enjoyed a healthy rise, with AP Images and AP Exchange together recording an 80 per cent peak over regular traffic to their sites during the event.

In total, over 1,400 inaugural images passed through their services from around the globe.

AP were not alone in their online triumph. CNN shattered its own record four-fold, by attracting 136 million views of its website and 21.3 million viewers to its live streaming coverage.

Web users were so busy watching President Obama sworn into office that Google noticed a distinct drop in the number of searches performed during the inaugural address.

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links for 2008-06-25

• Video: Jeff Jarvis and the Future of Journalism part 2 | Media | guardian.co.uk
  It’s a link economy, stupid

  In part two of his seminar to the Guardian, as part of the Future of Journalism series, Jeff Jarvis argues that links are worth more than content

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• YouTube home to nearly half web clips watched in UK, comScore reveals | Media | guardian.co.uk
  YouTube accounted for almost 50% of the 3.5bn video clips viewed by UK web users in March, well ahead of the 1.2% share of the BBC and its iPlayer service, according to research firm comScore.
  (tags: youtube comscore)
• Preview: CNET’s new, improved look | Outside the Lines – CNET News.com
  The new CNET home page includes a carousel highlighting several stories across News, Reviews, and Downloads, as well as an integrated video player for CNET TV content
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• Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution | Greenslade | guardian.co.uk
  The debate over blogging’s usefulness to journalism tends to get stuck in a cul de sac, mainly because too few people – well, too few journalists – treat it seriously.
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• Interview: Rob Grimshaw, MD, FT.com: New Niches, Pinker Pages, No More Subscribers | paidContent:UK
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• IPC buys Mousebreaker website | Media | guardian.co.uk
  Magazine publisher IPC Media has bought the casual gaming website Mousebreaker in an effort to increase its access to an audience of young male internet users.
  (tags: ipc)

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Early problems with ACAP

ACAP was designed to be a system that allows content publishers to embed into their websites information that details access and use policies in a language that search engines can understand.

Over on Currybet.net Martin Belam has outlined some of the major flaws, as he sees them, of ACAP – which launched in New York last week.

Here’s a brief outline, but you have to go to his blog to get the necessary full picture:

It isn’t user centred

“On the ACAP site I didn’t see anything that explained to me why this would currently be a good thing for end users.

“It seems like a weak electronic online DRM – with the vague promise that in the future more ’stuff’ will be published, precisely because you can do less with it.”

It isn’t technically sound

“I’ve no doubt that there has been technical input into the specification.

“It certainly doesn’t seem, though, to have been open to the round-robin peer review that the wider Internet community would expect if you were introducing a major new protocol you effectively intended to replace robots.txt”

The ACAP website tools don’t work

“I was unaware that there was a ‘known bug in Mozilla Firefox’ that prevented it saving a text file as a text file.

“I was going to make a cheap shot at the way that was phrased, as it clearly should have been ‘there is a known bug in our script which affects Mozilla Firefox’.

I thought though that I ought to check it in Internet Explorer first – and found that the ACAP tool didn’t work in that browser either.”

Update:

Ian Douglas, on the Telegraph, seems to have similar feelings about ACAP being too publisher-centric:

“Throughout Acap’s documents I found no examples of clear benefits for readers of the websites or increased flexibility of uses for the content or help with making web searches more relevant.

The new protocol focuses entirely on the desires of publishers, and only those publishers who fear what web users will do with the content if they don’t retain control over it at every point.”

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