A solar eclipse is a once in a lifetime event, so, it's fair to say, the stakes were high for NASA to get its livestream just right Monday afternoon.
Scientists had been preparing for the total solar eclipse for at least five years and the company started building its livestream about a year ago, NASA spokesperson Mamta Nagaraja told DC Inno.
For the livestream, they called on long-time contractor InfoZen, a Bethesda, Md.-based firm that acts as one of NASA's primary contractors through a four-year WESTPrime contract. From there, InfoZen called on Vienna, Va.-based Mobomo to build up the site's livestream page to perfection.
"We were in uncharted territory. We predicted that this would be our most watched event, but we didn't really know to what level," Nagaraja said. "Mobomo had the arduous task of testing [the site] to the limits that they possibly could and then being able to build something that could scale to the level above that depending on what happened on eclipse day."
In all, over 35 million people tuned into the NASA's six-hour coverage of the astrological phenomena, according to Mobomo. At most, they say 1.5 million concurrent viewers reached the site at the same time, and the average amount of time spent on the site clocked in between 3-4 minutes — which, for those of you unfamiliar with digital media analytics, is pretty high for a livestream.
Austin White, who was Mobomo's project manager for the project, said he owes a lot of their success to the flexibility of NASA. If the agency hadn't been so open and receptive to new ideas for approaching the build-up of the page, the entire solar eclipse livestream event could've gone differently.
"It's an example for how the federal government should be working with federal IT teams and contractors," White said. "I look at the requirements that came from the initial task order that came for supporting this event, and we obviously strayed away from it in positive ways throughout the way."
"If we had stuck to the language of the document, the whole event could've turned out very different."
Mobomo was responsible for building up the backend of the web page and created the interactive graphic that tracked the eclipse in real time to help people find the best viewing time for their location.
In 2013, Mobomo rebuilt the entire NASA website — creating a new Drupal backend and Javascript front-end without ever having to take down the existing site for maintenance. After the upgrades were made, NASA's website won a Webby Award that same year.
NASA isn't their first federal government client. White said the company's clientele is split evenly between both public and private sector clients, with the company's website showcasing projects with the Navy and U.S. Geological Survey among local startups like Real Time Cases and Pockitship.
But this project is different — it's much more than cleaning up an app's backend. This is the solar eclipse. NASA had predicted its livestream of the event would be its most viewed web page in its history, but it also didn't have anyway of knowing how many people would ultimately tune in.
"NASA usually publishes around 200 pieces of content per day," White said. "A lot of the time with these live events there are a lot of parallel between the people who are posting to the blogs and the social media feeds, and a lot of this was working with the Office of Public Affairs to see what they're expecting to do on the day."
The unknown also left Mobomo in a tricky situation when it came to testing. "It’s not like a movie where I can find a bunch of extras to click to our site, I would go bankrupt doing that," he said.
Instead, White opted to hire a seasoned user testing consultant to run a stress test on the site and simulate millions of people using the site at once. At the same time the consultant ran the test, White had a few people head to the site to see how it felt. He didn't tell them that at that very moment about over a million users were also on the site doing the same thing.
It’s not like a movie where I can find a bunch of extras to click to our site, I would go bankrupt doing that.
Because of the unknown though, White and his team opted to focus on user experience first. He said there were a million different ways they could've approached building a webpage of this sorts, so they opted to instead focus on the user experience and the rest would fall into place. Discussions for the site started a year ago, and Mobomo started physically building it around the end of March, early April.
"The testing side of it comes later. A lot of the technical requirements that we set out to accomplish came more not so from 'Can the system really handle this?' but we were thinking more about the user experience first," White said.
"There were a lot of ways that we could've built this page, but the way that we built it was so that the public's impact of 1 million people, 5 million people being on it at once did not degrade their ability to see the content or the different video streams we were coming up with."
Mobomo brought in feeds from 18 different sources — including cameras everywhere from Oregon to South Carolina — to create what viewers saw on Monday. All of that without a single glitch.
"As a person who works on a lot of federal projects in the IT space, I can't lie and say there isn't a little bit of stress that goes into it because you're preparing for a one day event," White said. "There's obviously a lot of thinking, rethinking, checking, re-checking behavior that goes on for a day like [Monday]."
