Total Solar Eclipse Lights Up Online Video Streaming

For those not lucky enough to have made it to remote reaches of Australia for today’s total eclipse of the Sun, a number of news outlets streamed the event live worldwide and are making it available on-demand.

The eclipse, the last total eclipse until 2015, was visible only from within a narrow corridor in northern Australia—it then crossed the South Pacific Ocean with no other landfall. The Moon's penumbral shadow did produce a partial eclipse visible from a much larger region covering Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, NASA noted.

The central eclipse path began in Australia's Garig Ganak Barlu National Park in the Northern Territory about 250 kilometers east of Darwin, according to the space agency. Traveling southeast, the umbral shadow quickly crossed the Gulf of Carpentaria and reached the Cape York Peninsula. The first and only populated region in the path is along the east coast of Queensland, with Cairns the biggest town in the path.

In short, the Internet is the more practical way to see the Australia eclipse—even for Australians.

Accordingly, outlets such as the Huffington Post (News - Alert), Space.com, Vibe, NBC and the Slooh Space Camera all provided live coverage online.

"We are ecstatic to have a world-class team on-site in Cairns bringing the power and beauty of this spectacular event live to our worldwide audience," Slooh president Patrick Paolucci said ahead of the event. "We are ramped up and ready to go to handle millions of viewers."

Space-related live streaming has proven to be a winning use case for online video broadcasts, most notably the landing of the Mars Curiosity rover, which set records back in August when it set down on the Red Planet. In the United States, online viewing beat out cable news networks in terms of viewing for the event.

The next total solar eclipse will be seen from the North Atlantic region in March 2015. Space.com also explained that a "hybrid" eclipse — which shifts between total and annular at different points on the globe — will be seen over parts of the Atlantic and central Africa in November 2013.