President Barack Obama and how the world watched the elections

Posted by Serge Jespers on Nov 5, 2008 in Industry, News | 7 comments

First of all, let me say: “Thank you America”! The whole world thought it was time for a change and I am really glad that you agreed!

I’m sure you’ll agree that this election has been historical in many ways. It’s also been an election that really used multimedia and the internet to the max with Obama being clearly in the lead. The internet gave the candidates a whole new “channel” to work with. Posting live updates on Facebook and Twitter and posting commercials on YouTube. Never before could a presidential candidate reach so many people.

On election day, the whole world was watching. Not just on traditional TV but even more so on the web. CNN already said that they had 27 million unique visitors on their site on election day. That’s 27 million people using a Flash application to get the latest results and/or watch the live coverage with the newly launched CNN Flash video player. Even though I know very well what the Flash Player is capable off, I also know that high traffic events like this one are not easy to stream but the new Flash video player didn’t even flinch once. Same thing for the MSNBC Flash video player and the Fox News AIR based video player. Just about all the big networks and newspapers picked Flash as their preferred technology to publish the results and they all did a really nice job.

To use some of the words of Obama’s victory speech: “If there’s anyone out there that still doubts that Flash is the best way to deliver data on the web in an engaging way, who still questions if Flash can deliver video to large worldwide audiences, today is your answer.” ;-)