The Daily Background

A lot of us, like myself, don’t have cable and thus can’t flip on CNN or MSNBC for all-day Democratic National Convention coverage on television. Luckily, we’ve come a long way since 2004 when live streaming web video of events like this was in its infancy.

• CNN (stream here; Flash player required) will have streaming video its websites for the full convention, although this may be rather slow, as their video servers are quite frequently overloaded by the sheer number of people trying to access them. CNN’s streaming video isn’t their live feed, but a special one prepared for online-only use.
• MSNBC (stream here; also Flash) does too, although their streaming video is their actual live feed, which means you have to stare at a boring graphic while they take commercial breaks.
• Fox News also has a few live feeds on their site (also Flash).
• C-SPAN will also have live streaming coverage on their website, and will likely post archived versions of major addresses both on their convention minisite and their YouTube channel. C-SPAN’s streaming live coverage requires Real Player and Windows Media (Flip4Mac is the OSX alternative).
• The Democratic National Committee Convention website has an official streaming video site here, which you can watch video on, starting at 3PM MDT, and lasting until 9PM MDT of each night of the convention. I’ve played around with it and it’s pretty cool– great quality video and very fast (for me at least). They’ll also have plenty of archived video of major addresses. The DNCC site requires new a new technology from Microsoft called Silverlight, which is available for both PC and Mac now (and is downloadable via the above link if you don’t already have it).

All of the sites here work on both Macs and PCs, so there should be no problems with compatibility, although you may have to download some browser plugins to watch the video.

Oh, and also for those of us with televisions but without cable, the networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) will have prime time coverage each day this week. Prime time is considered to be 7PM-9PM, Denver time (Colorado is MDT, so that’s one hour behind CST, one hour ahead of PST, or two hours behind EST).

For a list of who’s speaking tonight, see below:

Monday night
Tuesday night

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog