Livestream to Bring Times Square New Year’s Eve to the World
For the fourth year running, live streaming provider Livestream will be webcasting Times Square's iconic New Year's Eve concert and ball drop to a global audience. The event will be carried on thousands of websites, including Livestream's New Year's Eve page.
The 6 hour-plus live webcast will be produced by Livestream in partnership with the Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment, co-organizers of New Year's Eve in Times Square. It will feature camera feeds from around the square, coverage of the night's live concerts, plus interviews with street revelers and stars.
The New Year's Eve webcast begins at 6 PM Eastern Time on December 31, 2012, with the raising of the famous crystal ball to its perch for the midnight drop. The show will end at 12:15 AM, when the event winds down. Livestream's webcast will be supplemented by Facebook and Twitter feeds, for live interaction with viewers worldwide.
Livestream will cover New Year's Eve in Times Square using its own handheld and remote location cameras. It will also tap into camera feeds from All Mobile Video's Titan production truck, which is operated by Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment.
"Under the deal with the Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment, we're providing access to their 21 camera feeds," says Corey Behnke, Livestream's head of global production and services. "We take these feeds into a media solutions truck and send our program feed via fiber to our offices on 111 8th Avenue in downtown Manhattan, which is under two miles from Times Square. We intercut these with our camera feeds, including interviews and comments from our own hosts to create the webcast."
At of this writing, the lineup for the 2013 New Year's Eve in Times Square webcast was still being finalized. That said, this year's show will have some differences from last year's event.
"We'll have more content backstage than ever before, as well as a host that will interview various talent, and share a behind-the-scenes look for the webcast," Behnke says.
One interesting feature of the year's Livestream broadcast is that viewers will see CNN's Anderson Cooper and other network hosts interviewed about their coverage.
"We interview the hosts up on the camera riser overlooking the square, where each of the networks has one or two cameras," Behnke explains. "With our webcast, you get to see it all; including behind-the-scenes details of the event that the networks usually miss."
Livestream's 2012 Times Square broadcast garnered 600,000 unique views. That works out to roughly 27.5 million viewer minutes in 200 countries around the globe
As for this year's broadcast, Livestream has big expectations, especially when it comes to grabbing eyes from broadcast coverage.
"We're definitely gaining momentum annually as the technology improves and consumer behavior changes," says Behnke. "Annually, we've grown our audience 20 percent consecutively for the past four years."
Champagne image via Shutterstock.
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