Many eyes right watch NASA and the Discovery as they work to resolve the fuel sensor problem and get the shuttle back in the sky. A best-case scenario would be Sunday but more likely it will be later in the week. Certainly less dramatic but certainly work mentioning is the fact that some eyes will be able to watch the mission in an entirely new way, over the Internet.
This marks the first time NASA has used the Internet to cover the shuttle missions around the clock. They’ve certainly utilized television before. People were able to watch Neil Armstrong play golf on the moon and since NASA doesn’t just use technology, they are technology, this makes absolute sense. They’ve given two minor companies called Yahoo and AOL, access to just about the entire mission from liftoff until touch down.
AOL does have neat feature with their coverage and that’s the multi camera view of the whole thing including a “beach tracker view, a long range view, a camera actually mounted on the external tank which works until the solid rocket boosters dropped.
“By offering multiple live simultaneous video streams of the shuttle launch, we are providing an interactive experience for users, letting them decide how they want to watch NASA’s highly anticipated return to space,” said Lewis D’Vorkin, Vice President, Editor-in-Chief, AOL News & Sports. “No other online news site can match the interactive, live, unfiltered and on-demand video coverage we are providing through the AOL.com portal.”
Yahoo is able to boast running the coverage on NASA’s website on a co-branded Windows Media Player and it will stream the mission’s official online video from both NASA’s site and Yahoo.
Both companies will offer round-the-clock coverage of the 12-day mission covering nearly all aspects. People will be able to head to either NASA’s website, Yahoo’s or AOL’s to get quality coverage. This provides a good opportunity to show the media coverage capabilities of the Internet and more specifically Yahoo and AOL.
This is just one more step showing not only is Internet media coming into it’s own but it’s competing with the traditional television and newspapers for quality news coverage. While television news networks will certainly carry the lift off and some stories about the mission, the Internet will offer worldwide, 24-7 coverage. So whether you’re 14-year old in Tokyo who wants to fly someday into the stars or you’re a serious astronomer watching the skies in Boise, Idaho or in Bonn, Germany, you can watch the mission and watch it on your terms at your discretion.
AOL’s website designed for the coverage is sharp. It’s got lots of photos, stories and links spread about to let people get at all the information they might need. Yahoo has gone about this a bit differently. They haven’t designed anything really specifically for the mission. They way they’ve set things up is to go to NASA’s main site and work from there, which makes sense since they are sponsoring the live coverage on NASA’s website.
All in all, this will be a great experience for both companies. I would encourage folks to check out the coverage of either AOL or Yahoo or both. When this is done, I suspect one will see more and more coverage of events on the net. While it’s a little trickier to get the “spectacular 4-alarm fire” type of stuff on the net, for ongoing stories like this, it’s great. Many companies offer webcasts of stockholder meetings and corporate reports; this is really unique as a major news event will unfold before watchers on the Internet. I’d say we’ll start to see more and more of this type of coverage in the future.
John Stith is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
