Exploratorium’s Total Solar Eclipse
Not too long ago, we had the opportunity to sit down with Rob Rothfarb, Project Director of the Online Media Group at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Rob shared with us the Exploratorium’s educational mission, and how through both a multi-pronged content awareness strategy and multiple layers of video technology and testing, that vision became a reality. Across the world and devices (which included an app complete with live video stream), a whole new audience was exposed to a rare total solar eclipse.
Read our interview below for inspiration for your next event.
Brightcove: Tell me a little more about how live events drive awareness for the Exploratorium.
Rob Rothfarb: We have a very active webcasting program, and one of the things that we’ve focused on since 1998 has been expeditions to transmit live images of total solar eclipses from different parts of the world. By helping people to experience natural phenomena like an eclipse, we hope to inspire people’s curiosity so that they can make their own observations and hopefully experience a total solar eclipse in person. We present this as part of our educational mission with support from NASA and in the case of the eclipse this year, also with support from the National Science Foundation.
In addition to the dramatic live views of a total solar eclipse, we create additional educational content to drive awareness by addressing questions like: Why do we see eclipses? How do they work? What are the celestial mechanics involved? And then also diving a little bit into the local cultural aspects of the places that we visit as they experience a total solar eclipse.
Brightcove: How did you promote this eclipse? Through educational partnerships?
Rothfarb: Our website was the primary channel that we used to let people know that we had an expedition going to Micronesia to capture images of the eclipse. We also worked with NASA and news media to make the program available to them. A lot of news media picked it up, like ABC and the L.A. Times as well as astronomy websites and local blogs in San Francisco. We transmitted the program both to the Internet and also made it available via satellite to other partners. Some people picked it up that way, like NASA TV and the Associated Press as well as other news organizations. We also transmitted the live video from Brightcove into the 3D virtual world of Second Life, where we had two different viewing events which brought avatars from all over the world together to watch the eclipse.
We let people embed our live video on their blogs and websites, and many did. We found that actually more people watched the live event on other websites using our stream than on our own website, which was interesting to see.
Brightcove: So when you’re developing a video campaign of this depth and scale, how do you facilitate exposure on different channels?
Rothfarb: We wanted to make sure that the program reached both the general public and specific educational audiences. So we had a multipronged strategy. We used social media and our public website to push it to a general audience. But we also reached out to hundreds of museums and educational partners to let them know that we were making the live stream available for them to create their own educational programming around. That’s pretty key for us—we want to let other educational institutions create their own public programming or online programming using our live feed.
Brightcove: How would you advise others getting started with live broadcasting to make the most of their event?
Rothfarb: I think the key is getting the word out.
We offered to let other websites and bloggers embed the live stream and build their own articles or stories around it. Also, we put out messaging like, “Don’t just watch it on your computer. Create a solar eclipse-viewing event or party in your living room.” “Share the video to your television!” “Use our mobile app to watch it on the go, or share it to other devices for enhanced viewing.” People need to know their options.
Because of the location, this particular eclipse wasn’t a well-covered news story in the West, so it was, in a way, a little bit like the forgotten eclipse. So promotion was essential, but also coordination and logistics. Having a production crew in the field, and setting up backchannel communications is key. We had this all filtering back to the Exploratorium so we could understand what was going on and to coordinate the broadcast. Giving our audience a sense of what’s going on behind the scenes—bringing live images from a telescope on the other side of the globe to their screen, was part of our story as well. We created additional content assets to share some of the details of the live stream on our blog and web page.
Brightcove: You had to film on the remote island of Woleai in Micronesia, set up an uplinking feed to a satellite, and then turn that into a web-friendly feed for worldwide consumption. Could you walk us through those technological logistics?
Rothfarb: There are many layers of challenges from communications equipment, telescopes, and the mechanism to translate the optic signal from telescope to video. It was all challenging to set up, but the satellite transmission worked perfectly. For the Internet transmission, we focused a lot on encoding, the format, resolutions, and bitrates we were encoding it in, publishing the streams with