A Dribble of Ink

When the Ustream livestream video of the 2012 Hugo Award ceremony was taken down by overzealous copyright bots, cries of despair rang out through not only geekdom, but even mainstream news sites, like CNN, picked up on Ustream’s failure to broadcast the entirety of the ceremony, and their inability to react quickly enough to restore the stream when the issue was pin-pointed.

In response, Ustream has been working overtime to make up for the mistake, promising big changes to their procedures and offering additional support for upcoming Worldcons. In addition, they will be re-airing the ceremony this Sunday, September 9th, and will provide an on-demand version of the stream thereafter.

Details:

To makeup for the disruption to the original broadcast, Ustream will feature the full un-edited and bot-free ceremony on its homepage this Sunday, September 9, starting at 7 p.m. CT. Ustream will also run the broadcast ad-free on the Worldcon Hugo Awards channel at www.ustream.tv/channel/hugo-awards, and provide additional marketing and promotional support to raise the profile of the event. The broadcast will subsequently be available from the same channel on an on-demand basis. Ustream has also offered additional support and publicity for the streaming of future Hugo Award Ceremonies for upcoming Worldcons in San Antonio, TX (2013) and London, UK (2014).

I missed the live broadcast, due to family fun times, and all of the frustration that followed, so I’m glad to have a chance to watch the ceremony, especially since a few friends accepted awards that evening. Good on Ustream for doing everything they can to make right a very unfortunate situation.

You can read more from about the re-streaming of the event in the Chicon presse release, and Tor.com has more details about the event, the kerfuffle with the livestream, and Ustream’s response.