One did stick with regular programming. CBS and Warner Bros.' CW aired Oh, Sit! -- a title phrase highly similar to one members of the Cult of St. Barack were exclaiming during the debate -- and the season debut of Big Beefy Beefcake Boiz aka Supernatural. Supernatural went up against the debate and got 1.8 million viewers which, for the CW, is more than respectable. PBS isn't included in the ratings but the other broadcast networks were. ABC brought in the most viewers for the first hour of the debate with 10.3 million, CBS followed with 10.2 million, then NBC with 9.9 million and Fox with 6.9 million. All dropped approximately 3 million as the debate went beyond sixty minutes.
70 million may seem like a huge number. It's really not (Jimmy Carter debating Ronald Reagan in 1980 got ten million more viewers). The debate largely played out like it was the 90s and are choices were ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and Fox plus cable news plus NPR. The 70 million didn't include streaming online.
Fox News' website did a good job of streaming. You went to the website, the stream was easy to access and you were on board. That was not the case with Fox (Entertainment) where you had a link that you could click on -- or try. The link that was supposed to launch the live stream wouldn't work. They hadn't made it hyper-text, just text.
Hulu carried the ABC debate feed but might have carried the Fox feed if they weren't afraid Fox would make them embargo it for 7 days before non-Dish subscribers could view it. What Hulu and Fox did share in common was both required you to watch a commercial before you could go to the debate. While Fox News' extreme capitalism may make that understandable, we were confused with regards to Hulu.
When you're going to a website and there's a live stream available, that needs to be very clear. We thought ABC lost a few streamers as a result of their inability to promote the stream better.
NBC should have lost even more. Visiting NBC News' homepage during the debate, a surfer would find various stories about the debate being filed in real time, however, he or she would have difficulty finding a live stream. (Yes, NBC had one.)
CBS News did the best job. As soon as you pulled up their website, the debate was playing.
Like all but CBS, CNN required you to click on an element to start the live streaming. Possibly they felt they were already peeking interest with the photo that appeared to make it look as though Barack and Mitt were about to kiss?
CNN would go on to claim that 1.2 million streamers (worldwide) during the debate. Unlike CNN, YouTube would refuse to release numbers on its streaming.
It's doubtful they had many. For example, parents watching with their kids might have stopped the stream immediately due to YouTube's decision to run a Twitter feed next to their screen -- an obscenity laced Twitter feed.
Unlike Brian Stelter (New York Times), we can tell you how many streamed the first hour of the debate as it aired on The NewsHour homepage on PBS' website. That is because we screen snapped numerous times including when it reached its highest number.
27,863 was the most streamers PBS had at any given time during the first hour of the debate. You can see that number underneath Mitt Romney.
Democracy Now! never broke 13,000 at any given time. That might have been due to the fact that, of all the streams, it had the most problems. It went in and out, dropping or just delaying. One thing that the Democracy Now! live event did was provide Jill Stein (Green Party presidential candidate) and Rocky Anderson (Justice Party candidate) the ability to add their voices to the debate (the program would play a segment of the debate and then allow Stein and Anderson to weigh in.)
In terms of including the audience, only CBS News acted as if it was 2012. They naturally (and rightly) assumed that people hitting their website during a presidential debate would be doing so for the presidential debate and they made sure that the stream started as soon as the page loaded. You weren't required to watch a commercial first, you weren't required to click on anything on the CBS page. It loaded, there the debate was. Only CBS News appeared to grasp that the event was supposed to be a public service.