Press Release: Times Square 2010 New Year’s Eve Producing Live Webcast Of The Global Celebration
Event Organizers and Livestream provide revelers around the world with a backstage pass and opportunity to participate in the world famous Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration!
New York, NY (December 16, 2009) — The Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment, co-organizers of New Year’s Eve in Times Square, joined by Livestream, announced a new international six and a half hour web event from the Times Square New Year’s Eve Celebration.
The webcast will be streamed live simultaneously on TimesSquareNYC.org; Livestream.com/2010, Facebook.com/TimesSquareNYC and many other websites. Viewers can tune in to watch and chat live online. The video solution is integrated with social media tools Twitter and Facebook, as well as live blogging tool CoverItLive, allowing the New Year’s Eve producer to engage participants, interact with their audience, and viewers to virtually share the moment with others. Viewers will also be able to access the webcast on their iPhones at iphone.livestream.com/2010.
Online publishers will additionally be able to embed the Livestream video player along with its social media tools on their sites and make the webcast available to their communities.
Four co-hosts will cover all the action in Times Square from the 6pm Ball Raising ceremony to the hourly practice countdowns, stage performances, handouts, special guests and the midnight Ball Drop! For the first time, worldwide viewers will be able to participate in the celebration while focusing on five separate insider story lines throughout the night.
ONE WORLD REVEALED – tells the story behind the million revelers who make the pilgrimage to Times Square to be part of the global celebration at the Crossroads of the World. The co-hosts will seek out revelers from across the globe to discover their personal stories and share their energy and excitement to be celebrating the New Year in Times Square. At New Year’s Eve BlogCast Headquarters at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square, the program will follow the symbolic journey across the globe using a large world map to showcase the people who traveled to Times Square to celebrate together as the Ball drops. The worldwide audience will be encouraged to challenge the co-hosts to seek out revelers from their home countries. “Is anyone from Iceland here?”
WHAT IT TAKES – tells the story behind the Broadway curtain of actually producing New York City’s largest annual celebration through time-lapse videos, voice-over narrations, animations, and interviews with event producers and directors of key departments. The co-hosts and worldwide audience will discover not only the tremendous amount of work and state-of the-art technology but also the extraordinary personalities involved in the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration. The worldwide audience will be encouraged to ask questions from cabling to confetti, staging to pyrotechnics, video production to Ball Dropping; and the co-hosts will find the answers! “How many workers does it take to screw in a light bulb on the Times Square Ball?” Answer – none because the Ball no longer has light bulbs.
PHOTOMANIA – tells the story visually of the worldwide audience participating in this global celebration at the Crossroads of the World. The co-hosts will encourage the international audience to twitpic their New Year’s Eve party photos to the New Year’s Eve BlogCast Headquarters at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square. These photos will appear in the live Broadcast. Throughout the celebration, five photos will be selected for the global audience to vote for their favorite. The winning photos will appear atop One Times Square on the giant Toshiba video screen directly beneath the New Year’s Eve Ball. “Hey, look there’s Grandma in Times Square!”
TIMES SQUARE – tells the story behind Times Square and its world famous New Year’s Eve celebration. The party started here in 1904 with over 200,000 revelers celebrating the New Year. Today, Times Square is famous not only for New Year’s Eve but also the bright lights of Broadway, the streetscape of spectacular signs, and huge public gatherings throughout its history. The co-hosts and worldwide audience will be entertained by fascinating tales of Times Square told by the people working and living in Times Square. Moreover, the international audience will be encouraged to share their Times Square stories on the live blogcast. “What did you do on your first visit to Times Square?”
THE FIRST OFFICIAL NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE BLOGCAST HEADQUARTERS - tells the story behind the bloggers, guest panelists, moderators, and commentators working at the LIVE BlogCast Headquarters located at the Official Times Square New Year’s Eve party hosted by the Event Organizers at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square. BlogCast Headquarter is the central nervous system of the global celebration to encourage participation, collaboration, and dialogue with every viewer. The goal is more than passively broadcasting Times Square New Year’s Eve around the world; but to actively engage the world to virtually celebrate together. The New Year’s Eve LIVE BlogCast Headquarters provides the rare opportunity to bring the world together to reflect on the past, hope for the future and celebrate today!
WHERE TO SEE THE SHOW & PICK-UP THE WIDGET
The Times Square 2010 Live Webcast/Blogcast will begin at 5:50pm on December 31, 2009 and end at 12:20am on January 1, 2010. The show will be available at TimesSquareNYC.org; Livestream.com/2010, Facebook.com/TimesSquareNYC and many other websites. Additionally, the Event Organizers and Livestream are offering widgets of varying sizes for bloggers, webmasters, and digital media outlets to embed in their own sites as a source of fun and entertaining content on New Year’s Eve. For more information on the variety of non-commercial widgets available and the embedding codes, please visit www.TimesSquareNYC.org or www.livestream.com/2010.
