What a night!

Watching the space shuttle launch is always a great moment of joy for me. Hosting a space shuttle launch show on UStream.tv was the highlight of the year! Hosting the show with several hundred enthusiastic viewers and having dozens of people tweet excitedly about the show… Best moment I can remember having in a very long time. The interaction with everyone watching was amazing!

The SpaceVidcast.com live coverage of STS-123 is up to 15,000 views and growing. At any moment in time we have *hundreds* of live viewers. These are not staggering TV viewership numbers, but these are interested people who are actively interacting and asking questions about space travel. As the mission goes on the numbers seem to be GROWING which is the opposite of what I thought would happen. I assumed that as we get in to the mission with hours and hours of downtime people would log out and stop watching. Apparently a lot of people love to see space travel as much or more than I do.

I have a bit of an issue with the SpaceVidcast.com web site. I am recording things like the launch, mission briefings and some EVAs but every time I post to the site it pushes the live stream further down the page. This is bad as I want the live stream at the top with everything else below it. I may have to make a modified template for live launches that puts the UStream.tv window at the top and log posts under it. Not very elegant, but it may work. Anyone know of a good Wordpress plugin to pin a specific entry to the top until I unpin it?

Outside of minor quirks like that the whole process has been very smooth. CamTwist Studio 1.7 worked like magic. The whole look and feel of the show that BlueFox created was amazing. Everything turned out better than I expected for a ‘beta’ show with no advertising. I wonder what will happen when I start the AdWords, Google Radio and Google TV advertising campaigns? This thing could turn out to be truly interesting!

For your enjoyment, the launch of STS-123 as hosted by me on SpaceVidcast.com from t-9 minutes and holding (about one minute before they went to T-9 minutes and counting) to MECO:

2 Responses to “What a night!”

1. That was totally KEWL! Good Job Bencredible:-)

   By: Ben's Mom on March 12th, 2008 at 5:26 pm

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2. Bennny– that was fantastic!!! I’m glad you have it saved and I was able to watch the launch. When the shuttle detached from the main booster and the aura of blue nimbus heat surrounded it… wow.

   By: Ryan Carlson on March 18th, 2008 at 9:37 am

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