I have not been posting here lately mostly because I have been trying to make Spacevidcast coverage freaking AMAZING! I think it is working out well over there, but it sure does take a lot of time. In the end, I truly believe it is all worth it, even if I basically work 24 hours a day.
Before I mention the viewership stats for STS-132, I would like to point out that it was the final scheduled launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, so I'm sure viewership was higher because of that. For STS-131 we had 234,079 views live. I figured that we would probably get a 1/3 bump because this was the last launch of 104, maaaaybe if we were really lucky we would get 50% more views. Best case scenario would have been 400,000 views of the live launch.
On our SD/Mobile channel alone we had 692,715 views or almost 3x the number of viewers that we had for STS-131! That's just our SD channel and does not take in to account the HD channel or any of the on-demand versions of the videos.
To put this in to perspective, around 383,000 viewers tuned in to CNN that day according to
this report. In fact there is only one news network that had better ratings than we did that day, Fox News Channel with 1,065,000 viewers. So for NASA, if they want to reach people, a lot of people who are very interested in space flight, it is time that they turn to New Media and look away from the old media sources. I full well expect that by the last shuttle flight, be it STS-134 or STS-135 we will have better ratings than all of the cable news networks, including Fox News Channel.
THANK YOU to everyone who tuned in and helped make the STS-132 live coverage so amazing. I know we were syndicated on a ton of sites and had a lot of people working behind the scenes to make things happen. It doesn't matter if you were a viewer or contributor, thank you for helping make Spacevidcast out-perform traditional television. Not by a little, but by a landslide!
