01/21/2009

AP Press Release

Inauguration Day coverage propels record viewership of AP's online video services

The Associated Press provided eight million live video streams through its online video services for the historic swearing-in of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.

The AP, a not-for-profit cooperative, launched its ad-supported Online Video Network in late 2006 to provide news videos to more than 2,000 newspaper, broadcast and other media Web sites throughout the United States. On Inauguration Day, OVN featured a continuous webcast of the day's events anchored by AP reporters Jason Bronis and Sagar Meghani.

This was OVN's second recent anchored webcast, following its first-ever, offered on election night in November. That production resulted in 80,000 live streams.

On the multimedia front, Brian Scanlon, AP's director of election services, said there was "unprecedented demand" for Inauguration Day services. In addition to regular OVN users, some 160 media outlets subscribed to a premium online service that included a video widget offering a choice of camera angles in Washington as well as the anchored OVN live coverage. At the height of President Obama's inaugural address, as many as 374,000 concurrent streams were accessed.

In addition, AP Exchange and AP Images each recorded a nearly 50 percent increase in Web visitors on Inauguration Day with peak periods registering 80 percent more than on a normal business day. AP Exchange is a Web-based service that organizes and delivers news from AP to its member news organizations. AP Images, a commercial division of The Associated Press, contains one of the world's largest collections of historical and contemporary imagery.

Over a single 12-hour period on Inauguration Day that began at 5:45 a.m., AP moved some 1,400 photos from around the world tied to the inauguration story. AP Director of Photography Santiago Lyon said: "That's a remarkable number when you consider that our usual daily output is about 3,000 photos."

More than 600 of the photos during the 12-hour period were from Washington. AP's extensive photo coverage, including images from an orbiting satellite, assisted the news organization in estimating crowd size. As the AP reported, more than 1 million people crammed onto the National Mall and along the inauguration parade route Tuesday to celebrate the swearing-in of the nation's first black president in what was one of the largest-ever gatherings in the nation's capital. That Associated Press estimate is based on crowd photographs as well as comparisons with past events.

AP has covered U.S. presidents since Zachary Taylor's 1848 election.

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Contact: Jack Stokes, AP Corporate Communications, 212.621.1720