CBS Best Inauguration Video Quality, Hulu, C-SPAN The Worst, Others Not Loading

I've now watched over a dozen live feeds of the inauguration from most of the major news portals and hands down, CBS has the best quality and most reliable stream. Others like MSNBC, C-SPAN and Hulu are some of the worst and at least a couple sites has videos that would not even load. He's a quick run down on how the videos compare.

ABC News
The ABC News site had no problem delivering me an ad, but the live stream simply won't load and by the looks of it, the player doesn't even have a full-screen option. 

Associated Press
Looks like they are sharing the MSNBC stream, which makes sense since the stream does not even work. Looks like it is getting hung up on release.theplatform.com

BBC
Video takes a bit too long to load and quality is nothing special. Not bad, but lots of pixelation at full-screen. Should be a lot better for the BBC.

CBS TV Stations
Has the best looking video quality by far with at least seven HD quality streams to choose from. Clean, crisp and great frame rate. Hands down the winner for me.

CNN
Upon trying to get the live stream, I was put into a waiting room telling me I would be able to get the stream as soon as there was room. After about a minute of waiting, I got the stream which has decent video quality, but not great. And having to sit in a waiting room is just a bad idea. What is CNN thinking?

C-SPAN
Aside from crashing my browser twice, when I did get the video it was simply horrible. They are using the RealPlayer to embed the video in their page with no full-screen option and a very small video window, getting about two frames a second.

FOX News
While the video from FOX News loaded quickly, the video was quite dull with subdued colors and quite a lot of pixelation.

Hulu
Is sharing the same stream as FOX. Tons of stuttering and barely watchable.

MSNBC/NBC
Poor video quality. Very low bitrate, tons of pixelation and the stream took over 30 seconds to load. Same for the NBC News website since they are sharing the same stream.

NewYorkTimes
Probably the faster loading video of any site, with decent video quality as long as you don't want to enter full-screen mode.

Presidential Inaugural Committee
The video feed from the official website looked pretty good. Still not as good as CBS for me, but was still very good.

SKY
The SKY news site looked pretty good. Good frame rate, nice and smooth. Still gets beat by CBS, but not bad at all.

USA Today
Here's something I was not prepared for, the stream opened up in my RealPlayer! Quality is horrible and it looks like a stream that was setup for someone on dial-up.

UStream
Video would not load for me at all. The video player says "on air" but nothing shows up. Even tried the pop-up player with no luck.

Overall, not very impressive. Delivering live video on the Internet is not new and any major news site that relies on days like this to generate traffic has no excuse for not getting it right.

Comments

[Mat Rosa]

Nice list of who offered the feeds but a little pointless. Being that this is an industry blog I would've thought a more in-depth discussion of platforms, networks, etc would have been ideal for comparison sake so we could all benefit. A lot of us were watching a lot of feeds and we all had more or less similar experiences but without context it doesn't mean much. Also realizing that if you were fortunate to get on some of the feeds (like CNN) early on, the delivery was almost flawless, while jumping on late (after it was all over Facebook and Twitter where else to go - NYTimes.com for example) probably exceeded the capacity for that stream. And then there was the question of how good the video quality was in the first place - CNN and CBS had incredible quality because they had the cams in place, while the PIC carried the congressional feed and did not have a huge production team behind it.

[Dan Rayburn]

I can't go into who used what CDN. Many of the CDNs told me who their customers are but they can't give out that info in a public forum unless the customer agrees to it.

Akamai listed a bunch of the sites in the press release and Limelight did the delivery for MSNBC and CBS told me they used Limelight. CNN used Highwinds for the P2P/Octoshape delivery and Level 3 has some customers as well, although I can disclose who.

[Jerry]

To really get the full picture shouldn't we look at this with the context of how many simultaneous streams were delivered from each portal. It is easy to deliver high quality if you don't have to scale.

[Mike]

It looks like the CBS sites are continuing to use their player for on-demand as well. If you missed it and want to see how amazing it looks, just pipe it into your 46" Plasma/LCD screen and run full-screen mode. We did this at the office and brought everyone into the conference room to watch it.

If you're in NYC:
http://wcbstv.com/inaugurationplayer/default.htm