Watching The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade From Abroad

NOTE: Happy Thanksgiving 2007. Looking for the live webcast? The links below still work, but you’ll find it here if you don’t want to read further

Another Thanksgiving away from home (ie, the US), another Macy’s Thanksgiving
Day Parade that I can’t watch on TV here in the UK. Three years ago, I missed
the tradition so much that I took the family to New York so that we could watch
it live from a hotel along the parade route. Well, this year’s looking a bit up.
Earthcam has a live webcam of the parade route
here,
along with streaming video

here.

Someday the television networks (I’m talking to you today, NBC) will wake up
to the fact that there are more Americans living abroad than within some US
states. There’s got to be some money to be made off of us by offering a
simulcast of what NBC will broadcast
today. More about the parade can be found on the
official Macy’s
Thanksgiving Day Parade site. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Postscript: Now that the parade has happened, I thought it would be
interesting to post how it went as a webcast viewer.

First, I loaded up the stream on the family computer in our kitchen and was
thrilled to see the first marching band come past. But then I realized I could
probably do better by hooking up a computer to our TV.

We have an LCD TV that can take a computer video feed. So I plunked the laptop down
on the floor, hooked a video cable to the TV, ran a long network cable to the
computer from the router to ensure there
would be no problems with our internal wireless (which can be spotty for
bandwidth) and fired up the feed.

Once the video had started in the tiny window Earthcam shows, I right clicked
in the window and found the

actual URL. I copied and pasted that into Windows Media Player, and now I
had it going in a larger window.

Next, I set Windows Media Player to show full screen, and there it was –
after years of wishing, the parade live on my TV in the UK:

Blown up that large, the quality wasn’t so good. It didn’t help that the
camera lens itself was covered with raindrops, blurring some of the picture:

Here’s SpongeBob. Honest, it’s him:

The kids were thrilled when the big balloons came by and you could sort of
make them out. But they easily lost interest when there would be big pauses when
the feed flat out stopped. That could be our poor broadband, which barely hits
1MB. But it could have been issues at the other end.

Overall, big thanks to Earthcam for making this happen. But to make it
better, perhaps someone actually needs to monitor what was going out. Clean the
camera lens! Someone was clearly running it, since it would occasionally zoom
and move. And one last tip. When Santa comes at the end — zoom in on him, not
suddenly swing to the ambulances and emergency vehicles behind!