A Texas Filibuster: How Streaming Politics Beat TV

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Rodney GibbsOn June 25 at midnight, nearly 200,000 people worldwide were watching the Wendy Davis filibuster. Zero of those viewers were watching on CNN or Fox News or MSNBC. Instead, anyone that wanted to watch the most interesting political story of the summer, and quite possibly the year, tuned in to the Texas Tribune livestream. Rodney Gibbs, the CIO of the Tribune, talked about that night and the future of livestreaming content for the Texas Tribune.

Gibbs’ panel, A Texas Filibuster: How Streaming Politics Beat TV, discussed the crazy night of June 25. Prior to the night of the filibuster, Gibbs said that the maximum number of viewers on the livestream of the Texas Legislature was around 1,000. At about midnight the night of the filibuster, there were 184,000 people watching. By comparison, the Tribune livestreamed Julian Assange and Edward Snowden during this year’s SXSW and those only had about 15,000 and 50,000 views respectively.

The Davis filibuster was a “social media phenomenon” as Gibbs described it. Over the course of the day, the viewership continued to get larger and larger. A tweet from Barack Obama just further increased the swelling madness.

Concern grew in the Tribune offices that the livestream would go out. They had been having issues the entire session with faulty cables and technical glitches, and the system had never seen traffic like this before. Thankfully, the video stayed live through the midnight deadline.

Those concerns prompted the Tribune to take action going forward, however. They developed a three-prong strategy: affordable, portable, and scalable. The system that they implemented would need to be reasonable, as the Tribune is a nonprofit media organization. It also needed to be portable because, let’s face it, Texas is a big state to cover. Finally, it needed to be scalable. If a big influx of viewers came along again, the Tribune livestream would need to be able to handle the added viewership.

The Tribune believes they’ve found that system, with their new partners Livestream. With their new technology in place, they’ve been able to livestream even more events and expect the number of videos to get more and more frequent as the November election gets nearer.

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