In the United States, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – now in its 82nd year – is a traditional Thanksgiving morning activity. And while everybody loves a parade, few people love the so-called “witty repartee” of the anchors hosting the parade coverage. If only there were some way to see all of the inflated commercial icons and marching bands without having to suffer through commentary.
Thankfully (pun intended), Webware is reporting that EarthCam may have the answer. Tomorrow, beginning around 9:30 AM Eastern time (GMT -5:00), the company will be streaming the Macy’s parade from seven live cams. Only one of those cameras will have audio – and it doesn’t appear that there will be any hosts to detract from your experience.
This also provides an interesting opportunity for our non-US-based readers to get a glimpse into some of the strange goings-on of their American counterparts. No doubt, it will provide more insight into the US culture than we care to divulge.
The video is Windows Media based, so if you’re on another platform, you’ll need to have the appropriate plugins installed prior to viewing. And another thing, this appears to be traditional traffic cam technology, so take the “streaming” description with a grain of salt. It gets pretty choppy on some of the views.
To get an idea of what’s in store, you can view previous years’ parades, like this one from last year. To tune in, visit EarthWeb’s Thanksgiving 2008.
(Thanks to the_wb for allowing us to use the balloon image under Creative Commons.)