Going Beyond the TV to Report From A War Zone

The AP has a story about Al Jazeera English’s coverage of the recent flare-up between Israel and Hamas. The network had an upper hand with correspondents in Gaza, but the viewers who tuned in weren’t necessarily watching on TV.

Instead, the station streamed video of Israel’s offensive against Hamas on the Internet and took advantage of emerging online media such as the microblogging Web site Twitter to provide real-time updates.

Overall, the station’s Web video stream saw a 600 percent jump in worldwide viewership during the Gaza offensive – and about 60 percent of those hits came from the United States, according to the station’s internal numbers.

The jump in viewership reflects wider trends in global media, where the Web increasingly is the place where viewers go to watch video and social networking sites and citizen journalism are merging with traditional news coverage.

The AP story also reports on how AJE has been added to the Livestation platform. TVNewser profiled Livestation at the NAB Show last year.

Livestation said Al-Jazeera English footage viewed on its site jumped to 17 million minutes worldwide over a two week period during the Gaza conflict, up from 3 million minutes in a similar time period before the conflict began.

The service did not break down those numbers by specific country. But it said that over one full week of the Gaza conflict, the number of U.S. viewers to Al-Jazeera English on Livestation surged by six times the usual level.

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