These are the Droids You've Been Looking For

Short blog entry today, just letting you know that you can watch the April 29 launch of STS-134 on your Android device. Go to mobile.nasa.gov and select the “Watch NASA TV Live” link at the top. Be forewarned: it’s a beta, and we may reach a capacity limit. Also, because there are so many different devices using Android, some of them using different flavors of the OS, it’s possible the feed won’t work on some devices. We’ve tested them on as many as we can, but it’s impossible to be exhaustive. If you can’t get the feed, please let us know what device you’re using and, if you can, the version of Android and the media player.

Certainly has been an interesting few days for live video around here. Last week Yahoo, which has provided WindowsMedia streams of NASA TV since 2005, told us they wouldn’t be able to support the launch as they were reserving all their capacity for the royal wedding earlier in the day. They’re apparently expecting quite a bit of on-demand traffic for replays. Fortunately, we were able to work with Ustream to beef up our connections there.

There’s still a bit of a scramble since our primary feed comes out of the Marshall Space Flight Center, which was severely affected along with the rest of northern Alabama by Wednesday’s severe storms. As far as we know here in D.C., our people are fine, which is good. But our thoughts are with everybody there and across the south who has been touched by the storms.

As always, let us know how we’re doing, whether it’s with the Android stream or any other aspect of the site.