New stats from Ustream suggest that more people are forgoing television for online sources when it comes to getting news, the company says.
More than 3.2 million people tuned in to the live streaming platform to see Sunday night's landing of the Mars Curiosity rover, according to spokesman Tony Riggins.
"More people tuned in to watch the NASA Mars landing coverage on Ustream than many of the top cable news networks during Sunday primetime," he told Mashable in an email.
Riggins said that at its peak, Ustream had 500,000 concurrent viewers across all streams watching live. The platform had broadcasts spanning NASA HDTV, NASA JPL and NASA JPL 2
While there's no specific statistics for network coverage of the landing, Nielsen television ratings for Sunday's primetime slot shows that among viewers over age 2, CNN had an audience of 426,000. Other major networks such as MSNBC had 365,000 viewers, while CNBC received 109,000. Only Fox had higher numbers, clocking in at 803,000.
"This speaks to how much more sophisticated social media tools are getting on the web, even from just a year ago, and how consumers are adapting technologies to get news now from sources like Ustream," Riggins said.
Ustream also lets viewers interact in real-time over its "social stream," via mobile phones, tablets, streaming players and smart TV. Aggregating multiple social networks, this feature integrates audiences across Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. More than 102,000 social stream messages were sent on Sunday, according to Ustream.
The New York Times reported on television's downward trend in April.
"Across the television landscape, network and cable, public television and Spanish, viewing for all sorts of prime-time programming is down this spring -- chiefly among the most important audience for the business, younger adults," said reporter Bill Carter.
In contrast, Ustream's viewership has soared in recent years. From a reported 10 million unique viewers in June 2008, the platform said it now has 51 million viewers "every month" (though it's unclear whether this number refers to unique viewers).