Admittedly looking at the figures on ustream it's a lot more popular than I thought it'd be, but still less than the higher end of what you see on Twitch, and they don't get to plan when a stream goes viral.
Twitch has had massive growing pains, it's taken them a very long time to get to a point where they are smooth under load.
For a long time the LCS broadcasts were always very stuttery on twitch, so much so that streams were also set up on Youtube and Azubu to help.
About 6months - 1yr ago twitch suddenly got a lot better in this regard but I certainly wouldn't expect NASA to do a better job than a site dedicated to streaming. (The 12yr old playing the game is a red herring, they're just streaming to twitch.)
Twitch previously were Justin.tv but switched to gaming as clearly it was a fast growing niche, otherwise their old platform would have been suitable for factual content like this.
> The 12yr old playing the game is a red herring, they're just streaming to twitch
That was basically what I was getting at though - if the 12 year old can stream off their home broadband to twitch reliably for free, why is NASA bothering with their own, worse streaming solution?
But to their credit NASA responded very quickly, took their own streaming off and embedded ustream instead, so I guess I don't really have anything to whinge about.
I would love to see NASA's PR people get their heads out of their arse and actually stream on Twitch, also won't mind CERN doing it. And yes while it might not get as many view's as the latest goat simulator bench play presented by an ex-porn star in a bikini it surely can expose tons of people to things that actually matter.
