Major news outlets have delivered millions of video downloads since Hurrican Katrina turned her force on the U.S. Gulf Coast but local TV made the most of it. I caught a glimpse of this last week when Yahoo mobile geek Russell Beattie told me he finally got a sense of the devastation by watching WWL-TV — the Belo station then being streamed live by Yahoo News. I started to watch and I quickly understood the power of intense coverage by people directly affected by the unfolding events. WDSU-TV started live streaming a few weeks before Katrina blew through.
Frank Huisman keeps a global internet TV directory ; he told the LA Times’ David Colker, “It was much more intense, more frightening than watching CNN. … To watch something happening local gives you a whole different sense of it.”
Huisman said economics kept a lot of tv stations from streaming in first half of the decade but he sees it picking up. About 30 U.S. stations stream at least part of the day. (This seems low to me.) For now, internet tv is more about access to information than a visual substitute for most viewers. For WWL and WDSU, it’s now also about maintaining connections to viewers far from home.
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