Posted By
Steve Heikkila on 01/26/2009
The Presidential inauguration ceremonies happened from 8:30 to 9:30 AM here on the Pacific Coast. I work for a digital agency, so naturally we streamed the inauguration in one of our conference rooms. I sat there with a dozen or so colleagues, some sitting on the floor, many of us with laptop in hand watching the festivities while weeding through the morning’s emails and IM-ing and tweeting friends and family in other cities. It was a beautiful thing.
Imagine my surprise, then, to discover from Media Week and other reports that Barak Obama’s inauguration failed to set a new Presidential inauguration viewership record. Quite to the contrary, with a grand total of 38 million viewers Obama’s inauguration placed second to Ronald Regan’s first inauguration, which netted 41.8 million viewers.
With all due respect to the popularity of the Gipper, my immediate reaction to this news was incredulity. How could this possibly be? After all, this was History with a capital ‘H’ in the making: the inauguration of the very first African-American President. Everybody I knew had watched. The rather obvious explanation donned on me an instant later, of course. These reports were talking exclusively about television, and in so doing, they failed to see the digital forest for the trees. Once you include all of the viewers like my colleagues and me who watched the ceremony live via streaming video—over 21 million reported by CNN.com alone—the picture begins to look quite different. Add to this the astounding number of Twitter tweets, Facebook "Status" updates, You Tube and Flikr uploads, and other social media traffic that allowed viewers to share their experience with others across vast distances in real time and 38 million television viewers begins to look less like a lack of interest in the inauguration and more like a commentary on analog television’s final days.
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