Stream Partners With NASA to Live Stream the 2017 Great American Eclipse From Space Perspective
In collaboration with NASA, Stream’s video infrastructure will power the live stream of 57 cameras flying 100,000 ft in the air throughout the entire path of totality over the United States.
Charleston, SC — April 4th, 2017 — Stream, a leading live-first online video platform (OVP) that eliminates the technology barriers to live and video-on-demand (VOD) streaming, announced a partnership with NASA to live stream the 2017 total solar eclipse from cameras attached to weather balloons flying 100,000 feet in the air. There will be fifty-seven individual teams launching balloons at dozens of sites across the path of totality.
“We have spent the last three years researching and building the camera payloads and ground stations in preparation for eclipse day. The live-video distribution was the last technical hurdle we needed to overcome, and the partnership with Stream allows us to focus on the payload technology while they handle the video”, says Angela Des Jardins, Director of the Montana Space Grant Consortium and leader of the Eclipse Ballooning Project.
Universities across the country are participating in the project in cooperation with the NASA Science Mission Directorate, and the NASA National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program. On August 21st, the students will conduct high altitude balloon (HAB) flights from about forty locations across the total eclipse’s path, from Oregon to South Carolina, sending live video and images from near space to the NASA website. Video and pictures from the last total eclipse taken from near space were breathtaking — and have only been documented once before, in Australia in 2012. The 2012 eclipse flight was not live footage, making this the first total solar eclipse with a HAB live stream.
NASA is anticipating this to be their most viewed live streamed event ever, surpassing the Mars Curiosity Landing in 2012, which had over 100 million unique viewers. Stream’s video infrastructure is primed to handle this type of scale because it was built entirely in-house, with zero third party dependencies as opposed to other services such as Facebook Live and Periscope who are dependent on third party media servers.
“Delivering low-latency video from the stratosphere to millions of viewers presents some singularly challenging obstacles. We are thrilled to be partnering with NASA to provide a truly unprecedented, live video experience of an eclipse event. When we embarked on the ambitious journey of building a live video platform from the ground up, we dreamed of powering live events across the world. We are humbled and exhilarated to be working with NASA to raise those dreams a little more skyward” added Stream CTO, Jeremy Martin.
