Where to Watch Obama’s Inauguration on Jan. 20th

By Om Malik Jan. 17, 2009, 7:54am PST 13 Comments

President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration is turning into one of the biggest events of the relatively young new year. Thousands of people are going to Washington D.C. to participate in what is going to be a historic day. For the rest of us, who need to work, there are few other ways to participate in the ceremony.

You can use Give Real, a Facebook application, to send your friends (and family) across the country a glass of champagne (or something stronger), which can be redeemed at nearly half-a-million bars. If that isn’t your thing, you could send a text message — one of the 1.4 billion SMS messages expected to be sent on Jan. 20th, according to VeriSign. Or you could be like me and watch it online. Our NewTeeVee team has put together a resource list of not only where you can watch the inauguration online, but how you can watch it on on your 3G phone.

Via Broadband:

  • Hulu: On Tuesday, Jan. 20th, Hulu will begin streaming live coverage of the presidential inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama at 12 p.m. EST from Washington, D.C., which will run for approximately two hours, ending around 2 p.m. EST. It will be available on demand.
  • C-SPAN is using Mogulus to webcast a multichannel grid of inauguration activities from Saturday through Tuesday.
  • Livestation will offer international perspectives on the inauguration, with content from the BBC World News, euronews, and France 24.
  • CBS News will broadcast from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET, and will have a one-hour inauguration special at 9 p.m. There is a CNET webcast.
  • ABCNEWS.com will have Sam Donaldson and Rick Klein anchoring coverage from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. ET and will also cover Obama taking the oath of office on its home page from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. ET.
  • MSNBC will live stream inauguration coverage, as will FOXNews.com. FOX will be hosting discussions on their Facebook page.
  • CNN will be broadcasting live, and will be using Facebook status updates from users logged onto Facebook Connect at CNN.com.
  • USAToday.com and the rest of the Gannett newspapers are live streaming on their sites.
  • The New York Times will stream Obama’s speech and swearing-in on its home page.
  • Terra will show both Spanish and English webcasts of the proceedings.
  • Joost will be live-streaming CBS’s feed.
  • Comcast.net will have week-long coverage with streaming video, online polls and message boards

Via Mobiles:

  • Subscribers of Verizon V Cast, AT&T Mobile TV or MobiTV can all get live streams.
  • You can watch a live stream on your iPhone using Ustream’s application. More details on the Ustream blog.

Of course, you could just ignore all the ruckus and watch it all using your cable’s on-demand service — Comcast is offering all the speeches by President-elect Obama on demand.