As usual, interest in the 2012 United States Presidential election wasn't limited to inside the country's borders.
Worldwide, people watched, listened, read and followed along via their mobile devices. On the Twitter front, the social media king trumpeted the evening as the "most tweeted about event in U.S. political history," with more than 31 million election-related tweets.
Back to TV, while preliminary general ratings were slightly lower in the United States this year compared to election coverage in '08, viewership worldwide was still extremely strong. Also, the '12 election event brought on an interesting twist for one satellite provider.
"SatLink Communications delivered HD election coverage to Europe, the Middle East, Asia , Africa and the Americas using its Global Satellite & Fibre Network while uplinking to Asiasat, Eutelsat's and Intelsat's satellites and to the Internet reaching millions of viewers across the globe," SatLink CEO David Hochner said. "[We] saw a huge demand for mainly HD delivery and streaming solutions, which was something we hadn’t experienced for previous elections."
Past that, needing to provide coverage for a wide range of broadcasters — both geographically and culturally — provided a challenge as well.
"As a global distributor, [we] needed to take into consideration the different regional implications, especially when it came down to formatting," Hochner said. "We utilized the Snell Alchemist to convert the election's HD feeds from 60Hz to 50Hz, making it suitable for Europe, Asia and Africa transmission, bringing the highest-quality live coverage available."
A clean run on election night was the result of ample preparation and testing time beforehand.
"Over the past few weeks we have worked closely with our partners to make sure everything would run smoothly," Hochner said. "This included testing the signal reception at the multiple downlink points around the globe, and finding the right satellite solutions for their needs."
How about you, Experts? Did you notice any other new requests or possible trends? What about challenges during your broadcasts? Leave your comments below.
